I have to share this. Last night I had an appointment with a lady. I was under the impression that it was regarding life insurance, something I will need to get soon, however there were hints that there was some sort of "business opportunity". So during the meeting with her she explained the insurance coverage as well as investment plans offered. This took only a few minutes, then she broke into the "business opportunity" pitch. I was immediately skeptical of this pitch. In my area there are many JW’s who got involved with multi-level marketing companies. I have been pitched many of these "business opportunities" by close friends and have always been just barely smart enough to avoid them. Anyways, I amused her and let her give her pitch. I will say it was mildly interesting. After the pitch she invited me to a "corporate meeting" they were having last night. After a little prodding I agreed to attend. This is where my history with the JW’s, my enlightening on they’re true nature as a high control group and my research into identifying high control groups once again paid off. I went into the meeting very, very skeptical and I noticed some very real and very disturbing similarities between this "corporate meeting" (i.e. recruiting meeting) and JW meetings.
I’ll list the similarities I saw.
1. The first thing that struck me was how excited everyone was about their company. It was their life saver, the answer to all their financial problems. They constantly mentioned how the product they were selling was helping people, changing their lives in fact. This reminded me of all the JW’s who’s life was "saved" from all the problems "worldly" people face.
2. They handed out all kinds of awards for the most minor achievements like making a sale. They also got "promotions" for recruiting more people into their business. I found this similar to JW’s becoming pioneers, ministerial servants, elders, or even the accolades a person gets when they give their first MS talk or get their first bible study.
3. They had their own vocabulary and used common business titles in un-common ways. Do I even need to say it…. "faithful and discreet slave", Ministerial servants, "little flock", "great crowd", "worldly", etc. etc.
4. They paraded the achievements of the "higher ups" in the company, mentioning unabashedly how much money they were making. They even read aloud the amounts on the checks they passed out to the employees. I thought of all the congregation meetings, assemblies and convention programs where pioneers and missionaries bragged about the number of people they had brought into the fold, how many hours they were able to spend "witnessing", and how many publications they placed.
5. After the meeting everyone was very interested in talking to me and telling me how wonderful the company was and how it had "changed their life". This was interesting in that most of the people had only been doing it for a few weeks or maybe a few months. They kept trying to get me to sign up with the company, it only cost $199, money I was sure to make back "even before my payment check was cashed". Can you say love bombing? The way JW’s surround a new recruit and the meetings, encouraging them to have a bible study or become an "unbaptized publisher".
6. Probably the one thing that made the alarms ring loud in my head was one the lady that invited me asked if I was going to sign up, I told her I had to research the company and the products they sold. I told her I was going to look on the internet. Her words to me were "well just remember that a lot of the stuff on the internet is from people who are upset and they will lie about the company". I knew then and there that there was something very fishy about the whole thing. Sure enough when I looked on the internet the real truth about the company became very clear.
One other thing I noticed was of those people who were already employees almost all of them had a regular full time job, worked 50+ hours/week at their regular job, and were in debt. They were hard working people trying to claw their way towards the American dream and this company with it’s vulture like salespeople swooped in to pick at the carcass of these dying dreams.
In retrospect I wasted about 3 hours of my life last night. I did come away with something though, I now have more confidence in my ability to think critically and to identify when someone is trying to take advantage of me.
~LL06