Critics of the Amway business often claim we are somehow "brainwashed" into all thinking the way our upline wants us to. We just blindly repeat "tapespeak" without actually thinking about what it is we say, and us just blind devotees of "the system".

Some folk need a mirror.

On Friday an appeals court announced it’s opinion in regard to Morrison et al. vs Amway et al. The Morrison case is a 1 year old dispute primarily regarding BSM ("tools") between a number of Emeralds and one Diamond distributor and their upline in the Yager Organization. Amway was included as a co-defendant and filed counter-claims.

The Texas Court hearing the case referred it to arbitration. The arbitrator found in favour of the distributors with regards to all of Amway’s claims, and in Amway’s favour with regard to all of the distributors claims. In both cases costs were awarded, leaving the distributors with a $7million judgement against them, counterbalanced by a $1million judgement against Amway. (Amway obviously hires more or more expensive lawyers!). Not surprisingly the, distributors appealed.

The result of that appeal was announced on Friday – the court agreed (correctly in my view) with the distributors claim that compulsory arbitration did not apply as the dispute arose before Amway included the arbitration clauses in the Amway distributor contract. Thus, the case has been remanded by to the lower court.

So what’s the point of this post? Well, within hours various anti-Amway websites were crowing that the court had essentially declared Amway’s arbitration agreement invalid. The Internet Echo Chamber effect had begun. What I wonder is how many of these various commentators actually read the court opinion? A cursory reading when it was first released indicated to me that the court’s opinion rested heavily on the fact that the arbitration provisions were not in place when this dispute first arose. Now that I’ve had the time to read it properly, that view has been confirmed. While undoubtedly a "loss" for Amway, this decision, contrary to the rantings of the anti-Amway zealots, has little if any effect on Amway/Quixtar’s current arbitration agreement.

Brainwashed, blind devotees simply repeating the thoughts of their "leaders" without little independent thought … indeed.

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