The ‘Exciting Business Opportunity’ That Ruined Our Lives - The Atlantic
The ‘Exciting Business
Opportunity’ That Ruined Our
Lives
By Andrea Pitzer
The first time I recall my mother mentioning Amway, we were
in the car late at night, coming back from a meeting at her
boss’s house. Ten years old, I’d gone upstairs to play and
missed the whole point of the whiteboard sitting on an easel
downstairs. My mother, however, had been rapt. Riding
home with my brother and stepfather, she seemed almost to
glow, as if she were throwing off sparks in the darkness.
The name Amway, she told me, was short for the “American
Way.” We could sign up and buy products we already needed
for the house, then sign up friends and neighbors to buy
things, too. We would get rich by earning a little bit from
everything they sold.
It was 1978. I didn’t realize that this was one of those
moments, like Waterloo or Watergate, after which nothing
would be the same. Amway—or, as we soon began to call it,
the business—would become the load-bearing beam of my
mother’s existence for the next four decades.
The business as then practiced in our West Virginia river
town had its own culture. I found myself plunged into
religious nationalism, anti-communist obsessions,
denunciation of the very idea of public schools, and the
worship of money. Across my lifetime, versions of these
ideas would be marketed again and again to working-class
Americans. Amway leaders would help elect presidents.
Familiar characters from my childhood—the Amway celebrity
Doug Wead, members of the DeVos family, which cofounded the company—would reappear in Republican
administrations. In many ways, Amway adherents embraced
a fusion of conspiratorial thinking and populism that would
remain a central thread of America’s political story,
prefiguring the Trump era.
But for many years, I had no context for what had swallowed
my family. I had no way to understand how I’d managed to
lose my mother.
Amway products began to appear around the house. We
changed our laundry detergent to SA-8 and swapped our
toothpaste for Glister. I rode with my mother to upline
distributors’ houses to pick up the boxes that had been
shipped from headquarters in Michigan. My mother and
stepfather sponsored people into the business, who in turn
came to our house to pick up their own orders: makeup, hair
spray, a liquid soap you could use to clean anything, a
portable medicine case of expensive daily vitamins called
Nutrilite Double X.
My stepfather, who ran a local charity, began to introduce
himself as a businessman. My mother was even more
smitten with the beautiful future that Amway offered.
Everywhere we went—the mall, state parks, grocery stores—
she’d ask people whether they could use a little more money
each month. “I’d love to set up a time to talk to you about an
exciting business opportunity.” The words should have
seemed suspect. Yet people almost always gave her their
number. Her confidence and professionalism were
reassuring, and her enthusiasm was electric, even, at first, to
me. “What would you do with $1 million?” she’d ask, spinning
me around the kitchen.
My mother and stepfather stayed out late on weeknights and
weekends, bringing new recruits to see “the plan.” They paid
to go to meetings and rallies. I had no idea at the time that
these events were hosted not by corporate Amway but by
high-level distributors, who were technically independent
business operators. We bought books and cassette tapes by
the Amway personalities Doug Wead and Dexter Yager, with
titles such as Tales of the Super Rich and Becoming Rich:
Eleven Principles of Material and Spiritual Success. Wead
had been an evangelical minister before gaining a higher
profile with Amway. Yager had sold cars and Utica Club beer
before becoming one of a handful of top distributors. Their
wives wrote a book together. We bought that, too.
We ended up collecting more “motivational tools” than
cleaning supplies. A few people sold soap or makeup to their
friends at parties, Mary Kay–style. But for us, the business
mostly meant recruiting people to sign up and buy products
they would use themselves, while earning points toward
advancing to the next level and higher bonuses.
We became students of success, advised to set goals of a
bigger house and more expensive cars, as if wishing alone
could make it happen. But by this point, whatever cash we
had was spent on Amway. I had a pair of bell-bottom jeans
with three bright satin stripes sewn diagonally across one
knee. They were the only pants I owned.
One weekend during the summer of 1980, we packed jars of
peanut butter, loaves of bread, and fruit into our car, then
drove 300 miles east for a rally at the Washington, D.C.,
Hilton. On the road, my mother and I imagined what we
would do when we reached the Diamond level of the
business, when true wealth would arrive.
After we checked in, my brother and I were left to our own
devices, running the halls and playing in the elevators. I read
a pamphlet about how John Lennon’s “Imagine” threatened
America as a Christian nation, which introduced me to the
(dangerous) phrase secular humanism. I listened as leading
Amway distributors denounced public schools for
brainwashing children.
In the hotel ballroom, distributors sang along to songs like
“Rut Job Blues,” about how stupid it was to work a regular
job: “I feel so D-U-M-B / I’ve got a J-O-B.” Cheers went up at
any mention of Ronald Reagan, who had embraced Amway
for years—and would soon be president. (A few years earlier
he’d told a crowd of Amway distributors that “for me to come
here and talk to you about free enterprise is like saving souls
in heaven.”)
We went to more rallies—in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and other
faltering Rust Belt cities where people were laid off and
looking for hope. We ate up testimonials to God’s grace and
to his desire that everyone should become as rich as
possible. High-ranking distributors encouraged low-level
distributors like us to Drop that stinkin’ thinkin’ and Fake it ’til
you make it.
At one rally, my brother and I ran into Doug Wead’s son, who
was about our age. After walking around the hotel, the three
of us sat in our room and talked. I said how great it would be
when our mother and stepfather became Diamonds, so we
would be rich, too.
He told me I had it all wrong. His dad didn’t make serious
money through Amway products. Most of what he earned
came from writing books and recording talks. That was how
people got rich in Amway—selling motivational books and
tapes to distributors like my parents. Didn’t I know?
He spoke honestly, without malice, and the words rattled
around in my brain for the rest of the trip. I picked at the
upholstery on the seat of the car on the ride home. We
would never be rich. There was no other plan. We were
doomed.
What was it about Amway that so captured a bright,
extroverted woman like my mother? Abandoned as a child
when her own mother ran off to become a nightclub singer,
she’d been raised by her grandparents. She graduated from
high school with a journalism scholarship to college, but met
my father that summer and never left town. She became a
stringer for the local paper, later working as a lunchtime
anchor and interviewer for our local television station. When I
was a preschooler, she took night classes and earned a
bachelor’s degree in social work. By the time she discovered
Amway, my mother had divorced and remarried. My
stepfather had a more fundamentalist view of religion than I
had been raised with—a view that dovetailed with many
Amway leaders’ emphasis on biblical literalism and wives
submitting to their husbands.
My mother couldn’t imagine life without a husband. More
crucially, she believed herself destined for something
extraordinary. But how could someone achieve greatness in
Parkersburg, West Virginia? Amway promised to deliver what
nothing else in our town could—or at least to give her a
community that would pretend along with her.
For some Americans, joining the business might have been
harmless. For us, it was not. Soon my mother and stepfather
had no other job. Their bad decisions ricocheted in the echo
chamber of Amway culture, where they were encouraged to
dedicate themselves more deeply. Surely, any day now, we
would make it. Within three years, we were living in a filthy
house without electricity, eating food out of a cooler that we
kept filled with ice. Then we were evicted, and my mother
and stepfather declared bankruptcy. Ordinary people might
have thought twice about sticking with Amway. But by that
point, we had left the small dreams of ordinary people
behind.
A few months later, we climbed in a van headed to New York
to stay at another Hilton. It was New Year’s Eve. My parents
went to see the Rockettes and to hear the same speakers
they’d cheered on in other cities, singing songs, giving glory
to God, and talking about his vision for America.
When I was a teenager and my mother was in her early 40s,
she stopped talking to me about Amway. She filed for
divorce from my stepfather and started a graduate-school
program in behavioral psychology in hopes of becoming a
therapist.
Despite being more than a decade older than her
classmates, she was well liked and a good student. My
brother and I had already escaped to college, thanks to
cobbled-together loans, grants, and multiple part-time jobs.
I didn’t talk to either of them often, because in 1988, longdistance phone calls were expensive. But my mother called
one day to chat.
“Going crazy isn’t like being hit by a car,” she said in the
middle of our conversation. “People make a small but
conscious decision to give up. At some point, it’s easier than
living in reality.”
She was deep in clinical work with the mentally ill at the time;
I assumed she was drawing on that experience. Still, the line
stayed with me. In recent years, I’ve wondered whether she
was talking about herself, and whether there might have
been some way to intervene that I didn’t see. Because, just
two years later, in the last semester of her Ph.D. program, my
mother decided to quit and marry a third husband, one who
would do Amway with her.
Only much later would I hear stories about distributors like
us who had declared bankruptcy and begin to understand
how common our experience was. A 1980 study of tax
returns conducted by Wisconsin’s attorney general showed
that the top 1 percent of Amway distributors in that state had
lost, on average, $900 in the business. In 1994, Dexter Yager
and Amway faced a class-action lawsuit claiming that they
had fraudulently misrepresented how much distributors were
likely to earn and illegally pressured people to buy books and
tapes. The case was settled with Amway promising
compensation and changes that would require distributors to
make clear that motivational tools were optional and didn’t
guarantee success. The FTC had determined in 1979 that
Amway was not a pyramid scheme, but the company
continued to face allegations to the contrary. In 2010 it
settled another class-action suit alleging that it operated a
pyramid scheme. The company did not admit to guilt but did
agree to pay plaintiffs $56 million, in the form of cash and
Amway products.
In the years that followed, my mother and I would sometimes
talk about real life—a birth, a death, a grandchild—and
flashes of who she used to be would shine through. But she
also shared long lists of people the Clintons had supposedly
murdered, and continued to insist on Amway’s tremendous
potential. She always sounded a little embarrassed by the
things she said, as if she understood that they were hard to
believe. I think she wanted me to see that she knew that the
most cultlike aspects of the business were over the top, that
she hadn’t been taken in entirely, that she wasn’t some kind
of fool. But it didn’t matter. In the end, Amway owned her as
fully as if she’d believed every word. Despite interventions
my brother and I attempted, despite the money she
continued to lose year after year, our mother never gave up
on the business.
Illustration by Anthony Gerace
When I tell people how I grew up, I get a few different
reactions. Sometimes I meet people who thought about
joining Amway, and are relieved they never signed up.
Sometimes they’re surprised that Amway still exists—they
thought it disappeared decades ago. Most barely know what
it is. And why should they? They themselves might never fall
for such a hustle. But whether they know it or not, Amway
has deeply influenced American politics for decades.
Amway supported Reagan’s candidacy in the 1980s. In the
’90s, a co-founder of the business, Rich DeVos, gave the
GOP what was believed to be the largest-ever-recorded
individual political donation. Less than a decade after I first
listened to him on Amway tapes, Doug Wead became Vice
President George H. W. Bush’s liaison to right-wing
Christians. The Bush-era term compassionate conservatism
may have been an Amway invention—Wead is said to have
coined it. Dexter Yager, who had paid Reagan and Bush to
speak at his events, reportedly mass-distributed voicemails
pushing support for Republican candidates and accusing Bill
Clinton of trying to “force the emergence of deviant
lifestyles, of a socialist agenda.”
I grew up hearing rumors about the satanic influences
motivating Procter & Gamble, which Amway considered a
business competitor—stories that led to another lawsuit and
required distributors to pay $19 million in damages. Amway
didn’t invent the art of communal delusion via disinformation
—the John Birch Society had already perfected it in the
1960s. The Birchers’ influence was in decline by the time we
joined the business, but Amway’s culture helped carry their
unhinged style into the digital era.
In 2021, Doug Wead died. At the time, he was under federal
indictment—not for anything related to Amway, but for
allegedly funneling Russian money into Donald Trump’s 2016
campaign. In Trump’s first administration, he nominated
Betsy DeVos as secretary of education. An advocate for
school choice and religious education, she is married to Rich
DeVos’s son, Dick, who was president of Amway himself in
the 1990s, and whose family still co-owns the company. She
said she’d be open to returning to the post, “with the goal of
phasing out the Department of Education.” The rallies
leading up to Trump’s latest election, with their euphoric
resentments and tent-revival energy, recalled nothing so
much as a 1980s Amway function.
My mother had fallen so deep into the delusional
communities of Amway and religious extremism that I took a
while to realize she was developing dementia. Her
Alzheimer’s manifested in part as paranoid psychosis. Over
time, as her memory failed and her sense of her own
importance ballooned, she exchanged my actual childhood
for one in which we’d been staggeringly wealthy. She had
once been engaged to Trump, she told me. When a courtappointed attorney came to assess her legal competence,
my mother threatened to have Trump fire her. For months,
my mother believed she was working as Trump’s campaign
director for Ohio and Michigan. They had met through
Amway, of course.
It’s hard to leave a delusion behind. In the run-up to the
2024 elections, I noticed the ways in which Trump’s political
followers likewise struggled to abandon him. Some
prominent Trump supporters may see him as a means to
wealth or power. Others find meaning and community—or
even vindication—in accepting the lies he tells. Maybe,
eventually, when they see what his second administration
delivers, some voters will peel away.
That’s what happened with Amway. The company is still a
multibillion-dollar, global enterprise, though its domestic
profile is now so much smaller that it has a page on its own
website answering the question: “Does Amway still exist?” In
the end, more people left than stayed. Those who came to
their senses or were unable to sustain the delusion
eventually quit. But things can get bleak in the middle.
My mother was an outlier. As the illness devoured her mind,
she stopped recognizing her friends. But she still
remembered the business. At the beginning of 2020, just
three weeks before the pandemic began, I brought her to live
with me and my brother in Virginia. She set off the fire alarm
and constantly announced that the belongings she’d
misplaced had been stolen. But the hardest part was her
insistence that we all inhabit her imaginary world—one where
she lives in grievance and terror, a place of invented
enemies.
When I cleaned out her old house for her, I found storage
shelves in the basement filled with Amway binders, makeup
tutorials, old catalogs, and hundreds of motivational CDs and
cassettes. Like some ritual to release the dead, I emptied the
binders one by one. I filled a dozen Hefty bags, and then
more. When the outdoor bins could no longer contain the
trash, I stacked the rest on the ground by the curb: relics
that would help no one, souvenirs of a lost life.
The Atlantic Magazine (copyright 2025)
