Jay Van Andel And Richard DeVos
Multi-level marketing companies (or MLMs) ae stuff like Mary Kay, LuLaRoe, Avon, Herbalife, Cutco, etc. They all follow the same business model of promising people an amazing opportunity to be their own boss distributing their products, but the real money is in bringing in other distributors to get a cut of their sales, who in turn bring in other distributors, and so on until the organizational structure looks suspiciously like a, uh, “ziggurat of plans.”
This brings us to the biggest thing these companies have in common: they all get a bit prickly when you even remotely imply that their business scheme appears slightly like a cone with a polygonal base. In their defense, that label is a tad unfair. Actual pyramids are stable structures that are not nearly as obtuse. On the other hand, just like pyramids, MLMs are largely built on the backs of unpaid labor, and the bigger they are, the more people speculate about how they were able to pull it off. It turns out, nearly all of them have been following the blueprints designed by the biggest name in the game: Amway.
Amway was founded in 1959 by Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos, two lifelong friends and business partners who had spent the previous ten years as distributors for another MLM, Nutrilite food supplements. Sensing a growing instability in the Nutrilite brand, Van Andel and Devos sought to break out on their own and create their own MLM with a line of products to sell to their already established customer base. And much like Morrissey’s solo career, it didn’t take Amway long to become both a household name and totally radioactive. (We won’t even mention what product Amway sells because, frankly, it doesn’t matter.)
In the six decades since its founding, Amway has faced, by their own lawyer’s admission, thousands of lawsuits over their business practices. Most notably, a 1979 FTC investigation concluded that Amway did not meet the legal definition of a pyramid scheme, but only by a narrow margin. One example being, if it were a pyramid scheme, participants would be paid a headhunting fee for recruiting other participants. Instead, Amway only gives their “Independent Business Owners” a percentage of the sales of the people they recruit. See? Huge difference.
Amway has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past six decades paying fines and settling lawsuits over their business practices, and to their credit, they have made changes to their business model each time to correct those issues. The problem is, they only change juuuuust enough to keep themselves within the letter of the law. At the same time, the families behind Amway have been donating tons of cash to anyone in Washington who might help them move the legal goalposts.
White House
Pretty much any politician, PAC, and Super PAC in the past few decades that has ever called for tax cuts for the rich or for federal regulators to eat a bag of dicks is practically guaranteed a maximum donation from every subsidiary of Amway and various members of the Van Andel and DeVos families. Richard DeVos served as the finance chairman for the Republican National Committee. His daughter-in-law Betsy DeVos was Secretary of Education during the Trump administration, and her confirmation hearing was a fierce 3.5-hour-long debate over whether her bank account qualified her for the job. Jay Van Andel and his son Steve each served as chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest lobbying group in America and an organization that’s so anti-union they consider Labor Day to be a day of mourning.