Word: amway
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Dates: during 1979-1979
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...worked in a room called the Black Vault, off limits to all but half a dozen TRW employees. The group found plant security so lax that they spent their days getting drunk on booze smuggled in via a CIA pouch, mixing daiquiris in a document shredder and selling Amway household products over the secure telephone line. Chris was sometimes sober enough to be appalled by the messages he was handling: the CIA was spying by satellite on friendly nations like France and Israel and trying to topple the new leftist government of Australia...
...Andel started Amway in 1959 with Richard DeVos, a Grand Rapids high school chum who is now president and the other co-owner of the company. The two had joined a number of small enterprises after World War II, including a restaurant, a flying school, a commercial air charter service and a distributorship for Nutrilite. The two left to start Amway, taking with them a number of discontented Nutrilite distributors. The first product that Amway marketed was an all-purpose liquid cleaner called Frisk, and today soaps and detergents remain the core of the business...
...items are sold by "distributors," who are in effect door-to-door salespeople and earn a 30% profit on volume. Usually people with other jobs, they join Amway for extra income. They buy their wares from higher-level "direct distributors," who also sell door to door. Regular distributors are urged to become direct distributors themselves, and they do so by recruiting, training and supervising new salespeople. Though the direct distributor is not paid for signing up these recruits, he does make additional money by selling Amway products at a slight mark up to the distributors under him. To keep sales...
...Andel says that although top Amway salespeople can earn more than $100,000 a year, the majority, who may be housewives, retirees or even doctors or lawyers, probably make $50 to $150 a month. Though the result is a many-layered sales organization, it differs significantly from unscrupulous pyramid sales schemes like Glenn ("Dare to Be Great") Turner's Florida-based cosmetics operation, in which participants earned money by signing up new distributors rather than by selling the company's products...
...Amway has moved to diversify by buying, among other things, hotels in Grand Rapids and the Caribbean and the 950-affiliate Mutual Broadcasting System radio network. A political conservative who was sworn into his Chamber of Commerce job by his good Michigan friend Gerald Ford, Van Andel is an earnest backer of a tax reduction group, Taxpayers United Federation. He is also a supporter of a campaign to limit the number of terms for Presidents (to one), Senators (two) and Representatives (six) in order to reduce the preponderance of professional politicians, as opposed to "citizen" politicians, in Washington...