The Juice Wars

Nearly a decade passed since my experience with Amway had soured me on MLM's.  But still, that logical business model still made perfect sense to me.  I had often been heard saying 'If I could just get someone to build an Amway business for me!'... but alas, that could never be.

Daniel was a friend of mine who had attended a few Amway meetings with me back then called me out of the blue, excited about a 'miracle juice' called Xango.  It was my first 'miracle juice'... 

He was telling me all these amazing testimonials about people being healed of this and that... I think one person had psoriasis or something... I forget.  But he was jazzed about the stuff, and going on and on about it.  He told me what was in it, and I started doing my own research into this 'Mangosteen' miracle juice.  Granted, it did seem like some powerful stuff.  Very high in anti-oxidants, vitamins and the like.  Around that time I also ended up having an amazingly painful back/shoulder spasm after about a week of overworking to make a deadline.  Like knives digging into my shoulder kind of pain.  Not good for someone who has to lean over a drafting table all day...

I went to a chiropractor, I popped pain pills... not much helped.  NO, this is not the part where I tell you Xango made me all better... This is the part where I went to an Alphabiotics center where a guy named Steve basically poked, pushed and pounded my spine for about two hours... Acupuncture, acupressure and chiropractic techniques like I'd never dealt with before.  So how does this fit into the 'juice wars'?  Well, he sold me a bottle of Xango to help with the inflammation.  I woke up the next day swollen.  The day after that, I felt great.  Did that have anything to do with the Xango?  Don't know.  But it did pique my interest a bit.  That is, until I went to the Japanese market.

There I stood in a Japanese store face to face with a bottle of Mangosteen juice.  And not nearly as pricey a bottle of Mangosteen juice as I paid for at the Alphabiotics center either.  Next to that bottle, was a bottle of Goji.  A bottle of Noni.  A bottle of Acai.  A bottle of Mangosteen, Goji, Noni and Acai mixed together... A plethora of 'miracle juices', all for less than any MLM you could shake a stick at would ever sell them for...  So the concept of my plunking down more than I had to for this stuff from an MLM... well, let's just say it wasn't first on my list of things I wanted to do.

A couple years later, Daniel and his wife Erika moved closer to us, up in Orange County.  Laguna Beach to be specific.  And she met another gal who was into yet another 'miracle juice' called Monavie.  She wasn't particularly moved to get into another juice, especially so soon after the whole Xango thing flopped for them...  but then her friend told her about some actor from General Hospital who was having a Monavie meeting at his house.  Well, far be it for her to miss out on a chance to hang out with a real live actor, so she went.  And she got sold on joining Monavie.  She dug the product too.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not harping on ANY of these great juices... They are all really good products with lots of health benefits... And to prove it, she gave a bottle to my wife.

As I mentioned  in my other blog, my wife had had excema on her hands and arms for years, cracking, bleeding, itching, scaling... it was not pleasant.  After two days of drinking Monavie, it was GONE.  Nothing the doctors, or nutritionists could give her, be they pills, lotions, powders, cremes... nothing worked, but two days into drinking that 'miracle juice', and it was GONE.  God bless it.  Well, not willing to buy into another MLM, we decided to start buying the Monavie from Erika.  Eventually we even signed up to order it directly from the company.

But then I found myself at Costco, staring at another bottle of Acai berry juice called 'Fruita-vie'.  It was 9 bucks.  I had a case of Monavie at home that cost me $120, and I could buy this stuff for less than 40 a case?  I cancelled my autoship.  We're still not out of Monavie, but when we do run out, we'll be trying the Fruita-vie instead.

The juice wars for us weren't nearly as painful as it might have been, had we actively tried to build a Monavie business.  What with all the competition in the MLM Fruit Juice wars... Xango, Monavie, Noni, Goji, Zrii, Mandura, Zija, Limu Plus, Xelr8, Efujion... it seems like there's a new one every month... well, I can't see where you'd ever get someone to leave one juice company to shill for another, so you cut off HUGE numbers of possible prospects right there... And the fact that this juice or that juice... frankly, ANY juice can be produced for far less and sold in Costco or Walmart... to any struggling warrior in the Juice Wars... it can be just too much of a temptation to stop losing money every month and buy your 'miracle juice' from the big box store.

Or the Japanese Market, for that matter.

MLM: A cautionary tale...

THE SPORTS DRINK

I was probably 18 years old the first time I was introduced to an MLM, or 'Multi-Level-Marketing' company. The concept was completely new to me. My friends invited me over to their house, gave me a sample of an orange flavored drink they mixed up in the kitchen, and sat me down to watch a video.

For the time, remember this is some 20 years ago, the computer graphics were fairly state of the art. It was an impressive package, I recall. A golden eagle soaring through the sky, the model of a man working for gold ingots, and every time he went to put his ingot into savings, his savings had doubled... A crude illustration of the power of residual income that made me excited and energized... Or was that the drink? Either way, I thought, 'man, this, I have to get into!'.

The drink was indeed energizing, I don't even recall the name now, but there was something about it that really pumped me up whenever I drank it. I thought this would be a great thing to get into the hands of athletes and grow a business! Then I did something foolish, for someone who actually wants to believe in his product... I asked someone who actually knows a few things about health products.

My best friend at the time was a beautiful girl named Aimee. Her father was a physical trainer of some sort, I don't recall exactly. He took a look at the ingredients in the package and pointed out the high levels of fructose and caffeine in the product. Yeah, it gives you energy. The same way an orange and a cup of coffee will. But they wanted me to sell this stuff for a premium, and get my friends and family to do the same? Thus ended my first foray into the world of MLM.

THE GRAND-DADDY

A few years later, I had moved down to San Diego, had just gotten married, and a friend of mine said he wanted to come over and show me something... something POWERFUL that could make me RICH! Who am I to say 'no' to such an offer?

Ben comes over with a pad of paper, and a white cardboard box, sits down at my kitchen table and starts to draw 'the circles'. The circles, you see, show how you tell five people about this great business, and they tell five people, and they tell five people, and pretty soon, you're making residual income from five gazillion people, and low and behold, you are RICH, my son!

I looked at the paper, these circles, they make sense, don't they? I mean, I'm a logical fellow, and I look down at the math, and well, heck... this is perfectly logical! How can it fail? So I get excited. I tell my family. I tell my wife's family. I tell my friends. I tell the people at my new job. I tell friends at church. I tell strangers on the street! Why do I tell all these people? Why am I trying to 'sell' this opportunity to everyone with a pulse? Because that's what the SUCCESSFUL people in this business do. And as we all know, if you want to be a success, you follow the successful! That's just common sense.

The problem, however, is that as logical as this system is on paper, the one thing that Ben didn't illustrate on his yellow legal pad was that all those little circles? They were people. I mean, sure, they symbolized people, but they weren't really an illustration of what people are like. For example, people don't want to bug all their friends and family with business. People don't want to spend every waking hour trying to figure out who they can sell soap to. People don't want to get out of their comfort zones. Ben didn't show all those little facts on the paper. Just those beautiful, logical circles. Well, truth is, a circle is logical. People are not. Not generally, anyway.

If you haven't figured it out by now, this company was called AMWAY. The great-grand-daddy of MLM's. The decades old behemoth that has, indeed, created many, many rich people. Rich people whose lives are completely consumed by their business. Their every waking thought is about how they can build their business. How they can help their business. How they can find more people to join their business... And why do they need to do that? Because of the thousands of people 'downline' who have already hustled every friend, family member, church goer, and co-worker they know, and not one single person was interested in giving up their own comfort zone to join them in their Amway adventure.

So what do these grand poo-bah's of the Amway business tell them to do? FORGET THESE PEOPLE and find NEW friends, family members, church goers, and co-workers... After all, you don't want these negative people holding you back from your ultimate goal... which, supposedly, is to be JUST LIKE THEM. Living a life in a gilded cage, where your only real friends are those people who are either making you money, or you're making money for. In a very real and scary sense, it is a cult-like atmosphere propagated by the 'successful' in that business.

Now, I grant that it has been a long time since I was in Amway. And I grant that on paper... man, those circles always made sense, and still do. If there were some way to utilize the power of that logical system in a way that didn't turn me into an obsessed and friendless MLM zombie... THAT would be a golden ticket.

Did I actively pursue trying to find such a business? No. Of course not.

Ben, too, eventually quite Amway, not quite as dismal a failure at coaxing his friends and family into it as I was. But not quite good enough at it to actually see any of his dreams come true. Dreams like... breaking even, I suppose. And the seed was planted in my head and in a couple friends heads that somehow... this kind of thing can actually work. But not like that. Not like that.

Next: The Juice Wars cometh!