Amway argued that the quoted manual and the actual practice had been discontinued since at least 1972. Remember, the trial took place in 1978. The Judge listened but was not persuaded. Clearly today's companies must have the right words in their literature. But beyond that, regulators and prosecutors, as they did with Amway, will examine the company's overall attitude toward the issue.
Fertile ground are transcripts of company officer's speeches.
Our next move has got to be to work on his removal, but that isn't an easy problem, because if this person wishes to sell to anybody on the street at whatever price he wants to, you're getting into some touchy areas on price fixing. Now the only thing you can point out is that sooner or later the distributor is going to go broke - because you can't go on selling the product at what you paid for it and survive in the business. In the same speech, De Vos said that price fixing is a serious matter that the federal people and the FTC watch like a hawk. Still he persisted in his advice to pressure the price cutting distributor into compliance. The laws in the area of retail price maintenance are as strict today as they were in 1979 when the Final Order was issued in the Amway case.