Who Profits From Motivational Tools? Most of the income Amway Diamonds and Emeralds brag about comes from the sales of motivational-related items and events, not Amway products. The system is designed to keep you from discovering this fact. They tell you that the tapes and functions motivate you, but they really line their pockets. Tapes and functions keep you stupid. They get their hooks into you when you get "the dream", then they can control you. They tell you you'll only succeed if you imitate what they're doing (buy tapes, go to functions). If you challenge the conventional wisdom, they won't work with you, and your organization won't grow - you become the red-headed stepchild. It's manipulation and a mild form of extortion. Try doing the Amway business without buying tapes and going to functions, and see what happens. They'll tell you it won't work because your people need the tapes and functions to stay motivated. But the truth is that the big incomes don't get generated unless you, the sucker, buy the tapes and books, and go to functions. The more people they sucker into buying tapes and books, and going to functions, the bigger their retirement income gets, and the more dumb people lust after and throw away their lives in pursuit of the same illicit gain. If you're an Amway distributor, and tapes, books, and rah-rah functions are what you want in life, fine - spend your money and have fun. But wake up, get educated about the real 'Amway experience', and don't go around deceiving people about Amway. One visitor to this site left a message describing some of the details on how big Amway pins make money from tapes, books, and functions. He described one of his Diamond's rallies with over 20,000 people, and claimed that the big pins putting on the function were not charged to use the coliseum. The owners of the coliseum made their money from parking and concessions. The big pins (Diamonds and Emeralds) made their money from everything else. Let's see, somewhere around $65 per ticket X 20,000 = $1,300,000, plus vendor booth rentals, motivational paraphenalia sales, etc., etc. Now one can begin to better understand why the bigger pins push their underlings so hard to attend a minimum of FOUR functions per year. Cha-ching! Functions account for a big chunk of change, but that's only part of the picture. Amway distributors are constantly told they will not make it if they don't buy at least one motivational tape per week. The cost is typically $6 apiece. Now let's say you're a Diamond with 5000 people in your organization, all buying $6 tapes once a week (once a month two tapes are shipped - add another $6). That comes out to $1,920,000. Let's say the Diamond pays $1 apiece for the tapes - that's $1,600,000 profit per year. Cha-ching! Of course, the Diamond doesn't get the whole she-bang. Distributors begin to profit from tapes and books at the Profit-sharing Direct (PSDD) level. So the PSDD and everybody above skim off their part.