How to lose a friend?

There could be numerous ways to lose your friend. Some of those ways may be better than other ways. Some ways might be easier than others. Some ways might be more deceptive than others however recently I came across another way which is tried and tested, has been proven successful since almost half a century, and as a biproduct you may also earn some money. This sure shot way is AMWAY

AMWAY is a company which was apparently established around 50 years back according to the information I found on wikipedia. Recently I got the privilege of attending a short presentation from one of the Amway representative. Its called Amivo in the UK. Before attending the presentation, I did bit of a search on the internet and to my surprise (??) the presentation had precisely the same content.

This is how the business is carried out and also what I understood from it. The very first thing is, you sign up to be an IBO (Independent Business Owner) You then buy certain products directly from Amivo for your consumption. The first lot costs about £200 and you get products worth £200. (If its such a simple maths, why do I need to be an IBO to buy directly from Amivo?) Then you bring more people and when they sign up, you get a percentage of their consumption. Then those people sign up a few more and you get percentage of their spending and so on and so forth.

They claim that its not a pyramid scheme because a person who is at the bottom in the chain may earn more than the person who is on top of him, (and I tend to think it's pyramid scheme because your earnings are directly proportional to the number of people under you.)

The downside of this process is, every Amway IBO tries to get people under him, who will your first contact be? obviously your friends. If you are not interested in pyramid schemes or can see through them, you won't sign up, your friend, who only talks AMWAY now will try and get you to become a member, so you start avoiding him, may not answer his phone calls and pretty soon YOU (and him as well) WILL LOSE A FRIEND.

If you are on the other side, and you really 'get excited' by this 'business opportunity' presented to you by the sponsor (aka your upline) you become an IBO (aka downline) and this is also a scenario where you have knowingly destroyed your friendship to embark on the new relationship of 'upline - downline' where you will automatically start thinking of getting more people into your business.

This post is based on my understanding of Amway, if you do not agree to my view, it may be possible that the presentation I attended was not good enough to convince me of the potential, however if you do agree with me, god bless your friends!!