Tag Archives: critics

Cheryl Rhodes (Anna Banana), Commentary, Critics of Amway

Amway critics lie. Again.

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I’ve multiple times pointed out the lies of Amway critic “joecool”, who has been exposed creating false blogs and false identities simply to rubbish Amway. A reliable source contacted me a while back and told me that Anna Banana, aka Cheryl Rhodes, was doing much the same on her “Married to an Ambot” blog, and that many of the stories were plain made up, and many of the commentators were in fact Cheryl pretending to be a legitimate commentator.

Now she’s made it easy to show her dishonest activity. Earlier in the month she posted a blog “Worst Amway Distributor” and claimed –

Not too long ago I get an Amway employee working in the Alticor office in Grand Rapids Michigan end up at my blog after doing a Google search for “worst Amway distributor”.

I thought that was pretty bizarre, so I did that google search. There were ZERO results that referred to her blog except for that current post. (Virtually all the rest are her anti-amway zealot friends linking to that post.)

I tried searching with quotes, I tried searching without quotes. I tried it with all sorts of different search settings. I even tried Bing.

Until she wrote that blog post, google simply did not return her website as a result for that search. Clearly this search by this supposed “Amway employee” simply never could have happened as she states.

What’s the only conclusion? She made it up.

What else is she making up? My sources tell me an awful lot.

Critics of Amway

Critiquing the Critics

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Bloomberg Business Week has today published an article about the direct selling industry that appears to be little more than a propaganda piece straight from the pen of MLM critic Robert FitzPatrick. It astounds me that supposed journalists do so little research on these self-declared “experts” and even less on the claims they’re making. So I’m going to do their job for them and write a series of articles on some well known MLM (and Amway) critics, who they are, and how their claims stand up to the facts.  My current list –

General MLM Critics
Robert FitzPatrick (Pyramid Scheme Alert)
Jon M. Taylor (Consumer Awareness Institute)
Dr Stephen Barrett (MLMWatch)
Bob Carroll (The Skeptics Dictionary)
Rick Ross (The Ross Institute)
Tracy Coenen (Sequence Inc)
Steven Hassan (Freedom of Mind Institute)
Dean Van Druff (What’s wrong with multi-level marketing?)
Peter Bowditch (ratbags)

More Amway-specific Critics
Russell Glasser (The Perils of Amway)
Scott Larsen (Amquix)
Steve Nakamura (JoeCool, various blogs)
David Touretzky ( Amway/Alticor/Quixtar Sucks!)
David Brear (various blogs)
Shyam Sundar  (Corporate Frauds Watch, India)

If there’s others you’d like me to address, please drop me a note in the comments below!

Update:

New post on Steve Nakamura aka JoeCool –  Who is Amway critic Joecool? And does he owe me $50000?

Steve Nakamura (JoeCool)

Amway’s most prolific internet critic – what we already knew, confirmed.

10 Comments

Last month I hinted about some information proving the dishonesty of one of Amway’s most prolific internet critics. As I expected, that critic guessed who I was talking about and has attempted to cover his tracks. Alas, he hasn’t succeeded.

JoeCool is the (main) internet pseudonym of a former Amway and WWDB IBO by the name of Steve Nakamura. He’s based in Hawaii and has been literally obsessed with criticizing Amway since at least 2004. On the (now moribund) Quixtar Blog forums he has made over 6500 posts since 2004 (that’s more than 2.5 posts a day) and has been the originator of almost all new posts on that board for the last 2 years – most of the time by simply trawling the net for old posts critical of Amway, and reposting them.

In 2009/2010 alone, just on the two blogs he puts his “name” to, he published over 470 blog posts critical of Amway and at least a thousand comments on other Amway related posts on the internet. So far this year he has already published 90 posts just on the two “joecool” blogs. That’s nearly a post a day that he admits to.

The man is truly obsessed. Continue reading Amway’s most prolific internet critic – what we already knew, confirmed. →

Commentary

Amway IBOs get all their products free plus extra cash!

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Amway critics just love to quote various government mandated statistics that Amway publishes. For example, for some years now Amway in North America has published the statistic, based on a 2005 survey, that the average “active” IBO makes $115/mth. $115/mth doesn’t exactly sound like it will lead you to the land of your dreams does it?

So, of course, Amway critics cite that as “proof” that it’s a bad business opportunity and most people make little or no money. Indeed they’ll often go on to mention “expenses” and claim it means most IBOs lose money.

Well, there’s a saying you’ve probably heard – lies, damn lies, and statistics. Continue reading Amway IBOs get all their products free plus extra cash! →

Amway North America, Commentary

Chuck’s back! In a touch of irony …

8 Comments

As people who follow my blog know, it’s my opinion that a significant part of Amway’s struggles with growth in english speaking markets the past decade has been due to the influence of the internet. Back in the late 90s, early 00’s Amway made a conscious decision to effectively ban Amway business owners from posting on the internet. The end result was that the internet was effectively left to Amway critics and anyone using the internet to research the Amway business would be left with an overwhelmingly negative perspective, something I covered in The Internet War Against Amway Part I and Part II.

I entered the fray with the idea of trying to supply some balance. Like most things in life, Amway and Amway business owners are not perfect, but the internet focussed almost exclusively on “the negative” and the things that were wrong or needed improvement as well as acting as an echo chamber for myths and falsehoods. One example of the “balance” problem is the Amway article on Wikipedia, which has a large section devoted to controversies around Amway, yet little about the hundreds of awards that Amway has won, Amway’s global philanthropy, or the literally thousands of people who have reached significant levels of income through Amway.

So my “mission”, you might say, has been to focus on Amway’s positives, to try and provide some balance for folk researching on the internet. I haven’t completely ignored controversy or legitimate areas of concern, but in allocating my time and energy I’m focussed on getting the positive story out.

It was thus with a little disappointment that I initially followed Chuck Lia’s Speaking about Amway blog. While highly thoughtful and intelligent, I thought Chuck’s posts focussed a little too heavily on problem issues, and how he thought things could be improved. This is certainly a legitimate and useful thing to do, but frankly I thought we needed to get back to a somewhat more level internet playing field first, rather than have yet another person pile on the Amway critic bandwagon, even as an ostensibly friendly voice.

Well, after a 3 month hiatus, filled with great posts by rdknyvr, Chuck is back with a new post Speaking of Amway tacks into a fresh breeze with a focus on getting people to talk about what’s good about Amway.

What’s the irony? Well, just a few posts ago I posted with a criticism of some Amway IBOs, and my next post, coming later today, is going to be a bit of virulent rant against the actions of a major Amway organisation and the fact it’s endorsed by Amway Corporation.

So it’s a good thing you’re adding some “positive” balance Chuck, cause I’ve got steam coming out of my ears!

Amway North America, Commentary

How to improve Amway & Quixtar – Part I

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This was originally posted back on August 9, 2007, however it got buried in events later that day and Part II was never written. A few folk have suggested the topic is worth revisiting, so here it is! Some changes, such as shipping cost changes in the US and the whole new setup in the UK mean not everything is as relevant to all markets and applicable as when originally written, but most still is.

I’ve been pondering for some time what kind of changes could be made to the Amway and Quixtar business opportunities to make them better. Amway and Quixtar have been pondering the same thing, and on the Opportunity Zone blogs have been asking IBOs for their input.

I believe that “improvement” needs to be addressed in three different arenas –

  1. improvements that can be made related to consumers (of which IBOs are a part) such as addressing product pricing and shipping costs.
  2. improvements that can be made related to training, and part of that is to do with BSM and BSM suppliers
  3. improvements that can be made related to reputation

Obviously these areas overlap somewhat and in this post I’m going to talk about a simple change that could dramatically improve reputation, yet change very little at all. What’s the change?

Continue reading How to improve Amway & Quixtar – Part I →

Critics of Amway

Idle gossip from idle minds – another example of a clueless Amway critic

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In the comments of the post More Clueless Amway Critics, one of the subjects of the post, Amway critic pokerpooner, decided to add his side of the story into the comments. In my opinion all he successfully did was prove the point of the post – he’s clueless about the Amway business, how it works, and it’s potential as a business. Later in the discussion, when I asked him to provide some evidence to back up some claims he was making, he simply became abusive. In my experience Amway critics often require supporters of the Amway business to be able to provide incontrovertible proof of any claims. Indeed on more than one occasion I’ve been told that Amway Corporation is not an acceptable source for Amway sales data, since they’re probably lying about it. 🙄 Ask them for some evidence to back up their claims however, and all of a sudden they want to change the subject. Continue reading Idle gossip from idle minds – another example of a clueless Amway critic →