Amway Water Treatment Program (1980s)

Twelve minutes in, Amway appears. That is the structure of this tape: twelve minutes of thorough environmental doom — Love Canal, Long Island groundwater, 63,000 new chemicals released since World War II, 90% of past industrial waste disposed of improperly, chlorine treating your water but creating carcinogenic THMs in the process — and then a smooth pivot to a pressed carbon block water filter you can order from your Amway distributor. We streamed it on February 3. It is the most elegant bait-and-switch in the archive.

The first section systematically dismantles every competing water treatment method before arriving at the Amway product. Bottled water? Potentially tainted and expensive. Boiling? Does not remove chemicals. Water softeners? Not safe drinking water. Reverse osmosis? Can actually increase some chemicals. Charcoal filters? Work somewhat but miss fluoride. Only the pressed carbon block filter covers all the bases. The salesman walks on a lake beach in his suit during this portion. The tape is a T-30 format — an uncommon size — from the ManWithHats Collection.

After the product reveal, the tape shifts into sales training mode: brochures, a take-home format, merchandising tips, and a demonstration kit that lets you artificially contaminate a glass of water to show the before-and-after results to prospective customers. They also have a credit application. “Learning the facts about water pollution is unsettling,” the narrator acknowledges, approximately at the moment the audience realizes they have been watching an MLM sales video for twelve minutes. This specific Amway water treatment training VHS has not been found in any online archive.