Amway Distributors Clean Up on New Market in East Europe

When the new governments of Eastern Europe opened their borders to business, one of the first to cross over was Amway Corp. of Ada, Mich., whose zealous distributors have roared into eastern Germany and Hungary with their rah-rah sales meetings and relentless drive.

Amway--its name an amalgam of “the American way”--built a $3-billion empire with a worldwide network of about 1 million plain folks selling its cleaning products and recruiting other peddlers.

The firm has been criticized for using a system that generates revenue from the people persuaded to sign up as distributors at fever-pitched sales meetings. But the Amway way is becoming the German and Hungarian way, too.

Serendipitously, Amway opened a warehouse in West Berlin days before the wall came down in November, 1989, and it has since persuaded more than 100,000 eastern Germans to sign up as independent distributors at $40 a pop. It moved into Budapest on June 3 and has already enlisted 30,000 Hungarians.

The company is eyeing Poland and Yugoslavia.

Confident that his burgeoning East European sales force will show the same passion and fervor as Amway distributors elsewhere, Bill Nicholson, Amway’s chief operating officer, repeats a Jay Leno joke he heard recently on the “Tonight Show”:

“Did you see where Amway is moving into Hungary? And they think they had trouble getting rid of the Communists.”