A few months ago I started taking my family to a new church that’s closer to home. We had a great send-off from our old church and now we’re totally plugged in. It was definitely God’s will to move: all the confirmation signs are there. We have a great relationship with the pastors and other members of the congregation, and our friendships are growing by leaps and bounds.
Strangely enough, a lot of the people we know in this church are involved in an online network marketing system called Quixtar, (formerly Amway). Actually, to hear them talk about it, Quixtar is just the vehicle — there are actually several network marketing systems built around the Quixtar distribution machine.
What makes this strange is that when I met my wife, she was involved in the World Wide Dream Builders organization, which at the time used the Amway business model that eventually migrated to Quix. In fact, she was introduced to our previous church by a contact she met at a large WWDB function. Our old church was full of people involved in some form of Quix, mostly WWDB.
After five years of marriage we pulled the plug on our Quix affiliation for a number of reasons. To name only a few:
- I prefer to buy from a range of product lines, and Amway products aren’t part of that
- I work in Logistics, and understand the law of diminishing profits due to increased middlemen
- The products are too expensive, due to the increasing numbers involved in the distribution chain
- The bonus cheques are a pittance until you really move a lot of product
The way I explained it to our upline when accused of misunderstanding the business model: “The system cannot continue to function when everybody is a part of it. Somebody, somewhere down the line, has to have a separate JOB in order to bring new money into the system and pay all the residual bonus cheques of those who have gone on before them.”
I thought we’d escaped the whole AmQuix thing when we went to a different church, but because there are 1/5 the amount of people in our new church, the percentage of people involved in Quix appears higher compared to our old church.
That said, I’m highly appreciative of the fact that the people in our new church aren’t pushy — at least so far.
However, I have a personality that seems to attract all varieties of network marketing schemes, especially AmQuix. I have been approached or introduced to the product line for as long as I can remember:
- My aunt let us try the kit because her friends were involved
- My best friend took me for coffee to meet his prospective upline (he didn’t sign)
- My then-girlfriend, now wife, had me drive her to product pickup and attend various functions over 5 years
- On one of our first dates, I met a past friend from high school who was playing pool with his upline, a guy my wife knew about
- Another guy who was a real upstart in high school became high up in the business
- A guy I met at a swimming pool approached me, apparently by mistake, and took advantage of the contact to tell me about “the business”
- A fellow member of a volunteer choir had the entire gamut of products in his overnight bag
- While browsing the bulletin board at a grocery store, another browser just started prospecting me out of the blue
- (I’m pretty sure I saw this guy just a month earlier drawing the circle plan on a napkin for someone at a restaurant)
- The various people at my old church
- The various people at my new church
And now, as a shocker completely out of left field:
- Tonight, a guy who I met years ago at one of those fancy functions my wife dragged me to, who used to be high up in the WWDB system, called me on behalf of a friend of mine to introduce me to the INA variant of the Quix business model
What is it with Quix? Why can’t they just leave me alone????
Labels: amway, business, internet, quixtar, relationships, technology