The Km Chronicles

Note: This happened in the early 1990's when I was in my late twenties. Here I'm more aware of what's going on; if I'm willing to try out the stuff I know better than to buy into everything I hear. Hopefully my writing style communicates this.

Now, if the only brush with MLM had been with Amway, I would probably have thought little about it, noting only when I found myself in a Christian home that had bought into a prosperity cult unawares. However, another MLM was about to make repeated inroads into my life.

I had started hanging out with a group of people who ate regularly at a part-time restaurant, part-time hindu temple. It was an interesting group -- people who had followed their beliefs to the point of divorce, had suffered what I would consider bizarre slights to their world and shrugged them off as the will of God -- whomever that God was. They even told of dreams of the God they worshipped (no polytheists among this group, although each person's God had lots of names and sometimes went under lots of guises) taking revenge for their tribulations. In addition, there was the millionaire Hindu who everyone knew and liked.

In the center of this was the family who ran this restaurant/temple. He was a big man in the religious group he was a part of, both in being one of the disciples who knew the guru who made the belief a worldwide phenomenon and a wonderful cook who was also able to keep a household together in what was probably the city with the smallest population that had one of this religion's temples.

I got to know this person and the family, learned the stories and beliefs that he believed in, bought and read some of the books published by the group, and did devotional work in the restaurant/temple. Why not -- I had a chance to explore a radically different set of beliefs (which I did seriously), it gave me free vegetarian meals on occasion; and here was the closest thing I was going to get to living in the atmosphere of the sixties. Being born in 1965, this era is what consists the unconscious background of my being. And I was a moody and strangely nostalgic child. My parents had trouble handling that.

So, when the restaurant owner/temple priest told me of a product called Km and wanted me to see a video, I thought "Sure, why not? I'll take a look."

First, they told me of the magical powers the elixir had for them. The quote I remember most is "This stuff is what makes it possible to run the restaurant." No flags arose when this was said, as I know that less substantial wants have caused people to suffer greater deprivations and driven people to greater achievements. This same person then told me that the elixir had powers because its fourteen natural ingredients* came together in ways that nobody knew about.

RED FLAG!!!!!I believe in chaos theory, that doesn't mean the ingredients tell nothing about what's going on. Even if stuff mixes in ways people can't figure out, there should be ways to measure out each ingredient separately for benefits and "side effects."

Then I saw the video. It was about the man who created this elixir. For many years (according to the tape), he kept the elixir to himself. He then started sharing the stuff with friends, who then started selling it to friends, who started selling it to their friends -- suddenly he had a sales force that so believed in the product he didn't need to advertise; after all word of mouth was the best form of advertising.

RED FLAG!!!!! One thing I understood by now was that companies advertised because advertising works. If you don't believe this, then ask yourself why Apple Computer is still around. Seriously, the 1984 Super Bowl advertisement of theirs (which I feel had a greater effect on the advertisement industry than it did on the computer industry) was strong enough to keep them going for fifteen years; that they didn't do much advertising afterwards meant they needed most of them fifteen years to get their shit together. They depended on Word Of Mouth, and for many years I tried to evangelize for the Macintosh only to hear "it's too expensive" for many years; followed by "everyone else uses Wintel" when Apple tried to make less pricy Macs; then "They're Dead, Don!" uttered by a gleeful little brother (who works on Wintel computers, so I take his words with bucketfulls of salt). There were times when I though "I give up, no one will buy Macs, might as well get a Wintel computer." That people are buying Macs again is not so much because they've come up with a striking design, but because they're advertising again -- getting the name out to the public, instead of just to the converted.

Advertising works because it gets the name of a product out to the public. Every billboard for milk and cigarettes, every baldness remedy and financial service advertisement on sports talk radio, every furniture store and supermarket advertisement in the newspaper, every douche and tomato paste advertised on television, even the extra window that pops up every time you open up one of my web pages because my pages are on Tripod gets the word out that "here is something you can use." It's only the rare especially effective products that can go for a while without advertising, and even those run into limits.

Word-of-mouth, however, depends on a lot of things for effectiveness: whether the person is in any way believable, how much the person espousing the belief expects to profit from what he's saying (and how), whether the person listening actually is LOOKING for what other person is talking up, and what the person "being sold to" actually knows. Word of mouth works best when person A (the person looking for advice) is in a position to profit from what the person B suggests, and person B gives his suggestion freely, without thought of profit.

(Why else does every MLM work like crazy to create a situation of extreme need for every prospect, whether they're needy or not? They need the new person to be in a position of such dire need that the new person will jump through the hoops to sell distributorsh -- er, product.)

And here was a company that made a product which, if it worked, worked subtly at best. That they disdained commercial radio, television and newspapers for a system of person-to-person meetings obviously wasn't good.

Later on, he told me that the person who created the stuff, a ninety-five year old man, recently married a twenty year old blonde bombshell.

RED FLAG!!!!! Remember when I said this person ran a restaurant/temple and was a vegetarian? Well, not only was he vegetarian, but there were days when he refrained from eating grains and one day in the year when he didn't even drink water. He also woke up two hours before dawn, did hours of chanting every day and distributed the books that his group published. The religious group dressed in ways that hid from sight anything that might tantalize (while trying to dress comfortably). Furthermore, there were books he looked down on NOT because they disagreed with his beliefs but because they weren't scriptural enough. That's right, Adams Smith, George Bernard Shaw and all the Scientific evidence that humans developed from vegetarian precursors were not enough; you needed the scriptural proof from their texts to satisfy them. And here he was telling me that this stuff could not only help me make it to the age of one hundred (an iffy goal if you ask me -- I'd rather die from unnatural causes at seventy than live to the age of one hundred only to have the last fifteen years not knowing my name), but would also help me make it with women young enough to be my great-granddaughters without ingesting lethal doses of Viagra!

I wonder if he realized how much that statement clashed with his life.

Anyway, believing one should take care of one's self so that you don't become sick, I tried the stuff. Awful tasting, not much of a pick-me-up but it didn't harm me as far as I knew.

Eventually the religious friend moved out. I heard nothing about Km......until one of my coworkers came along selling the stuff. Again, I bought the product.

But this coworker became very irritating. He was always telling me "You're a sharp man, you look like you could sell the stuff." And when I made sure he knew in no uncertain terms that I wasn't into selling the stuff, he continued to strike up conversations with me, always trying to get me to talk about subjects I did not talk about with coworkers. I'm sure he felt he was being friendly, but there's only so much I'm going to chat about with the people I work with; as these aren't necessarily the people I would choose to befriend. Some of the more right-wing loudmouth types I chatted with ONLY because I happened to work with them; they were nice and friendly enough and would give their right arm to you if you needed it, but I would not have sought them out NOR befriended them without an extended period of cold shouldering otherwise. And here was someone trying to get to know me deeper than I wanted to be known.

Enter my mother! Yes, SHE got into selling Km; a puzzling development. After all, she had to live with me during the year before school when the only difference between me and an Amway distributor was that I didn't have an ADA number. She must have seen what it was like, still when the company wasn't Amway (or Amway related) she too was open to MLMs.

(Actually, it's not as surprising as I once thought. Turns out she had gotten into Amway around 1975, stayed active for a couple of months, then turned away when shen saw what was going on with it. That would explain the Amway-decorated products in the house through much of 1975.)

But it happened to be my lucky break -- I told the coworker I bought my stuff through my mother now, bought a few bottles (she needed the larger bonus check), put them aside and forgot about them. Because my mother lived an hour away, this was additional protection (as I inadvertently found out with Amway). I stopped buying the stuff.

Soon enough I found myself saying "NO again and again to other MLMs Mom got involved in. Things were hardest when she started telling me how I could save money if I changed phone companies, and how her phone service was "getting better all the time!"

RED FLAG!!!!! Hasn't phone service developed in such a way that people could depend on excellent phone service from the get-go? That she said her service was improving meant it couldn't have been that good to begin with. (Remember, this was before Ameritech was bought out by SBC and the midwest became Texas's backwater.) That would be the last thing I'd want to advertise to potential customers.

Turns out her phone service was EXCEL.

RED FLAG!!!!! Any company with a name that sounds like it's trying to motivate you OR evoke limitless vistas is a company to stay away from. Obviously they're trying to sell you something with the name, and the product sounds like it's the last thing that's being sold.

I eventually quieted her down on that. Turns out she still believes in the American form of freedom of speech; when I told her I got my phone service through Working Assetts, she backed off.

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