Dr. Ferazi said his wife Mary didn't believe in Amway until she got her first check for $2000. Last year the Ferazis got a $10,000 end-of-year bonus. And they've gotten four paid vacations, including Disneyland and the French Riviera.

Back in the 1960's the John Birch Society flourished in Southern California. It was real grass roots: neighborhood ladies dropped protest cards in stores that carried Communist-made goods, suburban families invited other suburban families over for dinner and shared copies of Robert Welch's Bluebook, bumper stickers glared from t he rears of cars on Los Angeles freeways—"Impeach Earl Warren", "U.S. out of U.N." In 1965 a political scientist in the L.A. Times explained the John Birch phenomenon in terms of alienation. The Birchers used their simplistic neighborhood techniques because they felt a strong distrust of big government and its traditional political process.

In a very similar way, again, strong in Southern California, flying in the face of traditional corporate marketing are two grass roots businesses Amway and Bestline. Both companies depend heavily on the recruitment of new salesman. Too heavily say some, and charge the companies with a pyramid structure, with riches accruing to the people who recruited people who recruited the people who recruited the people and so on. After being solicited six times in the past several months by six different people. "Say, John, I'd like to tell you about a Business Opportunity." I finally decided to have a look.

The Amway meeting took place in the Orwellian "swingles" Oakwood Apartments in Pacific Beach. There were about forty of us crammed into a room above Oakwood's recreation room where a couple of singles were taking fencing lessons and another couple of singles were playing shuffleboard. Most of the people at the meeting were wearing nice clothes and were very attentive. Dressed in a nice beige suit, young, mustached Doctor Stuart Mann, a chest physician at the Veterans Hospital in La Jolla, introduced the main speaker, Dr. Tom Ferazi, also an M.D. but just flown in from John Hopkins in Maryland. "A doctor selling soap, you ask?" he asked. Well, he and his wife had gotten involved with the company because they wanted to have their "dream home" and an "opportunity to ski and to travel" while they were still young. And he imagined that's why a lot of us were there, too. Multiple sources of income. The doctor was a perfect salesman. First of all, he was a doctor, an M.D., and he was selling soap. His vocabulary was very respectable. He used words like "fortuitous", "modicum" and "multiple sources of income". And he avoided using the company's name, Amway, until fully an hour had passed (because "some of you may have had preconceptions about Amway.")

Dr. Ferazi refrained from using the words pyramid selling to describe the Amway technique. In fact, that seemed to be kind of a dirty word, "yes sure you recruit other people to work for you but not a penny is made unless something is sold. This isn't a get-rich-quick scheme". And then he went on to describe how Amway worked: the one who actually sold the product got 30% immediate profit. The person who had recruited his immediate seller got a Business Management Profit of anywhere from three to seventy-five per cent. Dr. Ferazi kept emphasizing the positive side of things — "We share this business with our friends. What kind of people do you choose to share this with? People you can trust, people you can ski with."

Dr. Ferazi said his wife Mary didn't believe in Amway until she got her first check for $2000. Last year the Ferazis got a $10,000 end-of-year bonus. And they've gotten four paid vacations, including Disneyland and the French Riviera. The people in the crowd sighed, oohed and rubbed their hands anxiously.

After he spent some time philosophizing, "your whole life situation changes when you're financially independent," the doctor's wife stood up and walked to the front of the room to demonstrate some Amway products. She was an attractive brunette with her hair piled on top of her head. She showed how the Amway cleaner worker — much better than Tide — and how it was four cents cheaper per load. Then she brought forth the Amway analogues to Draino and Pledge. She held a lit match to the Pledge container and lit it, explaining that Buff-Puff, unlike Pledge, did not contain alcohol.

Probably the most convincing part of this housewifey presentation was her comparison of the Amway product marketing with that of Proctor and Gamble. Tide, she explained, contained a high percentage of fillers and fluffers, and had to be used in relatively large amounts, so that even though each package of Tide was cheaper than the Amway package, the money spent on advertising, packaging and promotion by Proctor and Gamble jacked the overall price of Proctor and Gamble far above its worth. And it was this idea of honest packaging and a grass-roots sales campaign by Amway, pitted against the hard-sell, Madison Avenue Proctor and Gamble that was very appealing.

I first heard of Bestline from a secretary named Marilyn. She kept talking about some great "business opportunity" she had discovered. And about all the guys in the business who drove Corvettes and Mercedes. "They gotta be makin money, drivin cards like that!" The Bestline meeting I went to was held in the Sheraton Hotel on Shelter Island. There was a little bit of socializing before the meeting began. The same kind of glad-handing as took place at the Amway meeting, but the people here kept stressing, "don't worry, you aren't going to have to sell this stuff. I sure didn't join to sell soap. The company needs people on the managerial level. That's our advantage over Amway; we're new, we're still growing. There's plenty of room for us to become managers." On the wall hung a banner proclaiming, "You're First in Line With Bestline." On one of the center tables sat a record playing singing, "Bestline is wonderful Bestline is wonderful, Bestline is wonderful...."

The master of ceremonies said something about "our high-quality product line" and then said we were going to see a film about Bestline. Instead of a film, it was a slide show, with the narration coming from the same record player. We found out that Bestline's cleaning discoveries were first made by a chemist, Mr. William Budrow, who, while recovering from an accident in a hospital, began to think about all the money his wife spent on household products. Then Mrs. Barbara King, the archetypal suburban housewife, came on, scarf, earrings, blond hair, modern kitchen, cup of coffee in hand, "I'm proud of this beautiful country and I'm concerned..." She was concerned about pollution. And she saw the solution in Bestline's B-70, an ecological soap, a product for the Seventies. We got a tour of Mrs. King's nice suburban house, saw her child taking a bath with Bestline soap and saw her husband wash his crankcase-oil hands with Bestline soap.

And then Bestline's founder, Mr. Williams E. Bailey, told us that Bestline could bring about a turning point in our lives. A picture of a sailboat was flashed on the screen. (So the decision was between skiing with Amway or sailing with Bestline?) "You may be asking yourself, 'how can I become a part of this?'" Mr. Bailey briefly described the hierarchy of Bestline: one could be a local distributor (the one who actually sells the product), a direct distributor (the local distributor's manager), or a general distributor (even higher up). And an example of each type of distributor gave his testimonial. Carol Reynolds, a direct distributor, had found Bestline while attending a girlfriend's baby shower. Mrs. Reynolds would have a party and invite ten people. Assuming she sold $8.75 worth of products per person she could sell $87.50 at each party and make a $25 profit. Although it had "been such a terrific experience" it was hard for her to remember everything about Bestline, she did remember that the extra money enabled her to make payments on her station wagon. The examples of the district and general managers were both men: one was a Bob Miller who had been "just getting by" with his job in a department store and the other was a silver-haired John Duncan who had become convinced he wouldn't be able to make the next highest executive position in his company, and that "I wouldn't be able to take my wife on our second honeymoon." Both, of course, had been successful with Bestline.

When the slide presentation was over, the lights came on and the M.C. bounded back up in front of the room and exclaimed, "Exciting, isn't it!?" At first, I thought he was being sarcastic and I gave a little chuckle. A look around the room, however, convinced me that no one else thought he was trying to be funny. This man then introduced the main speaker, a young, thinner man who explained how we could all become direct distributors (managers) for Bestline. He was a very personable young man. He had come to California with the marines, married a schoolteacher and had gotten a job at Allstate Insurance. He and his wife began to spend more and more money, buying china, pots and pans, furniture, and each month they began to have more trouble making ends meet. Then one night he got an excited phone call from his sister, telling him about this great business opportunity.

In telling the group about the Bestline program, the young speaker almost exclusively dwelled on the fast way to become a direct distributor. "All it takes is twenty-nine ninety-five." $29.95? That's not too bad, I thought. And then he was clearer: "All it takes it twenty-nine hundred and ninety-five dollars to reach this middle level of direct distributor." Before the audience had much time to ponder this point, he was introducing direct distributors in the audience who had "made it" with Bestline. There was a football coach who had gotten a $1200 bonus last year, a teacher who had gotten $2400 as a bonus last year, and a Navy captain who had gotten a $2400 bonus. "Did ya ever get a bonus like that in the Navy?" the young man asked.

In case any of us thought that the motives behind Bestline were anything less than angelic, the young man provided us with a moralism. "If you're not improving personally, you're dying. Bestline has really changed our lives. I now buy roses for my wife all the time, and we have adopted a step-son in India where there's nothing but poverty and ignorance. He's gonna graduate in Zurich and speak four or five languages and though this may sound corny, we can say it was Bestline that did it."

A little more socializing after the speech. The Chinese wife of a Navy lieutenant said she was going to try to take Bestline to Taiwan, but of course she would have to check with Chang Kai Shek since he was dictator. A few glad-handers approach me, "how about coming tomorrow morning for the follow-up orientation? This may be the one chance in your life."

So this was pyramid selling: recruiting other people to recruit other people to recruit other people to sell. It seemed as though Bestline's approach could more properly be called pyramid selling than Amway's. Bestline kept playing down the fact that eventually, someone was going to have to sell the product. So what you really got with "twenty-nine ninety-five" was the hope that you would be able to persuade some of your friends to give up their $2995. (A call to the state Attorney General's office revealed that the Attorney General has a suit against Bestline in a Los Angeles court.) At least the Amway presentation stressed the importance of selling the product itself.

In spite of the obvious problems of a neighborhood, simplistic approach like Amway's and Bestline's, and some of the hedging in an approach like Bestline's, however, the idea of a grass roots marketing system is fascinating. It is especially fascinating that in rootless Southern California society, where a simplistic frustrated political movement like the Birch Society flourished, the grass roots businesses like Amway and Bestline are so strong.