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Distributor cancelled an order and we need to move 30k bags of coffee [updated]

402 points by oftenwrong 4y ago

corgi609 4y ago
It seems like a lot people here aren't reading the full post. All the numbers and the situation are laid out.
Eleison23 4y ago
When I was homeless, I found a job with a "call center". Our training consisted of teaching us the cover story and how to handle reactions to it. We began with a joke involving alcohol. Then if they didn't hang up we launched into the pitch: "We just lost our lease on our warehouse, and we've got to move all these pens. You can get them imprinted with your name and phone number for a bargain. What do you say?" I quit within 3 days because I'm not a liar.
- sva_ 4y ago
  I am curious about the joke involving alcohol.
  - odysseus 4y ago
    If alcohol can damage your short term memory imagine the damage alcohol can do
  - Eleison23 4y ago
    [dead]
  - projektfu 4y ago
    The answer was posted but for some reason was flagged. Did someone take offense?
- DaveExeter 4y ago
  That's more what I would call "strategic misinformation". Ok, ok, it's a scam, but a very common scam! Similar to the white van scam. They really should teach people about these scams in school.
- adolph 4y ago
  Was second prize a set of steak knives?
  - JimtheCoder 4y ago
    Parent comment didn't actually quit, he just got third prize...
    - adolph 4y ago
      Could have quit while driving away in the caddy
- raverbashing 4y ago
  This sounds like a variation of the toner scam
georgeburdell 4y ago
One thing that irks me about dealing with big businesses, that the post touches on, is payment terms. If I buy an item, I pay for it immediately (or if it’s large enough, a creditor pays for me). Big companies pay with IOUs that say they’ll give you cash later, say 30-90 days from now or after criterion X is fulfilled. They do not care if you’re a small company with poor liquidity. I think it’s absolutely abusive behavior
- jraby3 4y ago
  That’s more specific to the food business. I run an advertising company and we always take payment in advance and work with several large (publicly traded) companies.
  - georgeburdell 4y ago
    I have experience in the semiconductor industry and it operates similarly to what the post described
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    Amazon's retail profit comes from investing the money they postpone paying suppliers until 30+days after the customer pays Amazon.
  - convolvatron 4y ago
    more specific to the physical goods business. if we establish a relationship where I'm regularly ordering merchandise from you - invariably we set up a regular billing cycle w/ a 30 day payment-from-invoice.
  - imroot 4y ago
    I know of a few retailers that operate on Net 270 terms for their smaller vendors (Looking at you, Home Depot) and Walmart would tell us that they would reset the 'calendar' if we would call and ask for the status of a payment. This was 2003-2006ish, for the record.
    - 4y ago
johnchristopher 4y ago
> Then, 3 weeks into the process, with the orders still coming, Marcus pointedly asked him about why they were ordering so much more than the 6,000 bags they had originally predicted. The food broker laughed and said “I wondered why you’ve been so upset and concerned. When they said ‘units’, that was cases. They’re right on target so far.” You can imagine how we felt in that moment, realizing that the person we hired to make this a smooth transition and to guide us and to tell us the things we don’t know failed to ever ask us if we were ready for a 36,000 bag order. This is equivalent to a year and a half’s worth of coffee for us. We would NEVER have agreed to this had we known. It was more than we could physically or financially handle. We immediately severed our relationship with this food broker figuring at this point we were better off figuring this out without him. > “I wondered why you’ve been so upset and concerned. When they said ‘units’, that was cases. Ouch. I get a lot of flak at work and at home when I get irritated that people don't use the right words and terms and this story won't change my attitude. Eg: - "we want a new tab on the website" -> they want a new subdomain with a whole new CMS and a link in menus of every site - "we want a new site to highlight this thing" -> they want a single page with a photo and a paragraph but want to be able to change it themselves at will
- HillRat 4y ago
  One thing that I came back to time and time again while consulting is that most operational problems are, in whole or in part, language problems, in the Wittgenstein sense. I worked with a lot of clients to define and document “linguistic boundaries” in their organizations where terms could abruptly change their meanings, and then used that to help silos communicate more effectively with each other.
  - halkony 4y ago
    Can you provide good reading, books, etc on this skill? I'm a junior dev and I notice this everywhere in my org. I'm just dipping my toes into DDD by Evans but it's a bit opaque to me.
    - HillRat 4y ago
treis 4y ago
This doesn't really make a lot of sense. How can bags be mistaken for cases when negotiating a deal? The price would be different by an order of magnitude. Why would orders trickle in like this if the product isn't getting shipped from the distributor and sold? Maybe I'm overly cynical and wary of things on the internet but somethings not adding up here.
- davidmurdoch 4y ago
  It probably went something like "we can do $5.00 per unit, sold in cases of 6" "Ok, we'll order 6000 at that price"
  - SkipperCat 4y ago
    Yes, but at some point a purchase order has to be drafted and a contract has to be signed. Those things should be spelled out in detail. I'd think the big company would almost demand that or else the coffee roaster could ship 6000 zip lock baggies with 10 coffee beans in each. I know that's an absurd example but a PO and contract protects everyone against that and that's why any reasonable company doesn't proceed without defined terms.
    - jfranche 4y ago
      Possibly this is the real reason the order was cancelled. Once the unit/case thing was figured out, the distributor realized they’d have to pay 6x more or the seller realized they were getting paid 6x less. The deal fell apart.
  - treis 4y ago
    Sure, but when the order comes written down something would be wrong. Either you would have: 6,000 units @ $30 per unit Or 36,000 units @ $5 per unit You can't have: 6,000 units @ $5 per unit with the expectation that you're going to get 6,000 cases
- kioleanu 4y ago
  probably „Can you move 6000 units?” “Yes we can move 6000 units at 10$ per pound” “Sounds great, get them going!”
viburnum 4y ago
I can't put my finger on it exactly but there's something about this story that isn't making sense.
- yellow_lead 4y ago
  Like agreeing to contract terms you are entirely unable to uphold?
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    Or understanding exactly what you are signing up for and what is in the papers you sign. And what does each and every term used mean.
  - kulshan 4y ago
    They didn't even understand the terms they agreed to. The distributor didn't "grift" them. They weren't swindled, it was just bad business decision making and lack of understanding their terms.
    - ArmandTanzarian 4y ago
      Perhaps not a grift, but surely the guy who arranged this deal (who they have since ceased doing business with) could have more clearly communicated to them to what it was they were agreeing. There are multiple points of failure, and it seems the company accepted the crippling responsibility on their end.
      - yellow_lead 4y ago
        I understand that but unless he is an attorney he has no business explaining contract terms to you. Always read contracts yourself or have an attorney read them.
    - mattkrause 4y ago
      Sure, but this definitely happens. In college, I worked in a lab that used disposable pipette tips to measure/move samples around, which come in small "racks" like these https://www.coleparmer.ca/i/thermo-fisher-molecular-bioproducts-a22221prx-mbp-universal-fit-pipette-tips-1000-ul-3-racks-x-200-tips/2571164 https://www.coleparmer.ca/i/thermo-fisher-molecular-bioprodu... We normally got a copy-paper box or two of these at a time, which lasted for a few months. However, one day one of my colleagues, who did not grow up speaking English, placed the order and asked for a huge number of cases, thinking "case" was a synonym for the individual plastic boxes that they came in. It...was not, as we found out when a delivery man appeared up with a motorized pallet jack. He's a bit miffed too: "Is there an easier way to bring up the rest?" The order ended up filling an entire closet and then some. They were still working through them when I left a year later. In retrospect, the price was obviously too high, but it was a small part of a big equipment order--and science stuff is often eye-wateringly expensive anyway.
AlbertCory 4y ago
Sigh. Big business vs. the little guy. I recall when I took basic accounting, we learned that common payment terms were "2/10, net/30" meaning "2% off if you pay within 10 days, and it's all due within 30 days." So it was common practice to wait 30 days (or more) and still take the 2% off. This is in no way blaming the victim, but "for a total of $216,000 in debt" I would hope I'd just say, "no, we're not doing that." One of those hard calls that nothing in business school can prepare you for.
- JimtheCoder 4y ago
  "One of those hard calls that nothing in business school can prepare you for." Do you really need a business school education to see that this was a mess right from the beginning, though? It sucks for the small business owner, but at the same time...if you sign one of the largest contracts of your businesses life and are not even sure that you are selling individual bags of coffee or cases of bags of coffee... No business school is going to help that level of dumb...
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    did I not say that?
    - JimtheCoder 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - AlbertCory 4y ago
        Ok. I was being charitable to them. Naïve people get themselves into this stuff all the time.
  - corgi609 4y ago
    If you read, the contract was not for the goods, the contract was about the policies of getting paid. The units was an estimate from the distributor about what was going to be needed later. There wasn't a contract about the goods. That's not how it works with a distributor anyways. The distributor is invoiced for the goods that they order, as they order them, and if you read the story, there were several orders. There is not a contract for all of the goods.
asah 4y ago
It's 101 that wholesale buyers order by the case and for producers to specify the casecount and price, and for errors like this to be caught when the prices/etc don't line up. This is equivalent to not knowing that URLs can redirect, or that http:// http:// and https:// https:// aren't the same thing. Distributors work with 1000 brands each and don't have time (or margin) to babysit. Also, when a company gets a much larger and different customer, I would expect any CEO to pickup the phone and talk with peers about how to manage the process. Brokers are outsourced commissioned reps, not shareholders.
- sva_ 4y ago
  > It's 101 that wholesale buyers order by the case and for producers to specify the casecount and price, Not sure why you're being downvoted because thats standard in wolesale. Not sure how they couldn't catch that when looking at the price either. Maybe they thought they'd sell a lot less for the same price and aren't talking about this?
  - Enginerrrd 4y ago
    Reading their description, there is no real point in which anyone takes real ownership of this mistake and so something like this is probably likely to catch them again. Did the consultant drop the ball? Yes, but so did they, in a pretty big way. Still, I've run businesses and when you're trying to bootstrap without experience this kind of thing does happen.
    - 88913527 4y ago
      If you are unsure to what extent you can or cannot depend on the consultant, you might as well do all the work yourself at that point. They cannot add value to the process; they could have not paid the consultant and worked directly with the grocery distributor. The addition of the consultant led to a delegative mindset ("I'm paying someone to handle that problem") that ultimately didn't pan out for them.
      - deleted 4y ago
timerol 4y ago
Great to see that all of these got sold! The numbers in this story don't exactly line up, in a way that tells a fun and clearly stressful story: (The cases have 6 bags each.) The intro to the blog post mentions 34k bags of coffee actually made. The initial order was thought to be 6k bags of coffee, but was actually 6k cases = 36k bags of coffee. So it looks like some got sold off between the delivery fiasco and the blog post. Later in the blog post it's mentioned as approximately 30k bags sold for half off + free shipping. It looks like at time of writing there are $5277 in donations at $50/case, so 630 bags from the fundraiser. The Fire Sale has sold out at 24k bags, short of their original 30k bag goal. (Edit: They sold out of all of the caffeinated coffee, not all of the decaf.) They raised between $173k (all $7 bags + donations) and $197k (all $8 bags + donations), not counting the substantial shipping costs for 4k cases of coffee. The debt likely to be paid off first is $60k of personal credit cards, $65k of business credit cards, and $45k of personal loans (there's a social cost to keeping these after such a successful fundraiser). $170k total here, leaving the $66k of other debt to be paid off more gradually. (Edit: They only have decaf left from the sale coffees. The 4k bags not put up for sale, and some remaining decaf, are all of their excess inventory. Ignore following paragraph) ~~I'm guessing that they chose to keep the extra inventory after seeing the wild and immediate success of the sale. Knowing that they can pay off their worst debt, and getting a ton of new customers as well, they'd rather have the extra 6k bags around to sell at normal prices. It's also possible that they sold out of one type of coffee first, and that helped them decide to shut down the sale, rather than keeping it updated with the different varieties still in stock.~~ Modest Coffee now seems poised to be successful. Extra stock, no longer extra warehousing space needed, exposure to a ton of new customers, and their worst debts paid. I wouldn't be surprised if they look back on this fiasco as their biggest success in a few years.
- JimtheCoder 4y ago
  "I wouldn't be surprised if they look back on this fiasco as their biggest success in a few years." Wouldn't that imply that they would be doing even worse in the future?
  - timerol 4y ago
wutheringh 4y ago
Is this grifting? How did the distributor benefit?
- spcebar 4y ago
  The distributer said, "actually we don't need this much, so either take back this enormous amount of coffee that we know you can't handle or give it to us for free and you can "write it off on taxes," which leaves the coffee company screwed on their loans. When the coffee company says they want to take it back, the big company tries to make them pay an enormous fee. The grift, as I understand it, is in the distributor saying they needed X and then saying they didn't need it and giving them two shitty options for how to proceed.
  - seneca 4y ago
    Those options were explicitly laid out in the contract they signed, they even say that in the blog post. It's not a grift if they tell you up front exactly what will happen.
    - halkony 4y ago
      I'm happy they were able to move their stock, but yeah. Something got signed with these terms in it. So you need to account for the possibility or have it renegotiated. This sounds like the business equivalent of college advisors. They had an advisor who was probably well meaning but couldn't fully accommodate the young company because of ignorance/inability/whatever and now they're deep in a decision they never would have made. $5-10k in a decent retainer would likely have prevented this.
      - Espressosaurus 4y ago
        I'm not convinced of well-meaning. I've seen this same scam happen with a different distributor in a different domain. This is the classic "if you owe the bank $1000 you have a problem, if you owe the bank $1 billion the bank has a problem". And thanks to the net N terms + control of the end client, you're the bank.
seneca 4y ago
This isn't grifting, and if they had specified the distributor it would be libel. This is a story about a small business that made a lot of bad decisions and got in way over theirs heads. That's all well and good, but the spin to try to make themselves look like victims is pretty disingenuous. This sounds like the story you get from a teenager about how it's everyone else's fault after they're caught red handed doing something wrong.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Exactly. And if you deal with (shitty) small businesses you’ll hear this or variants time and time again. Part of the reason Walmart has crushed all their small business competitors.
- nebulous1 4y ago
  Yeah. I guess it could be grift if the distributor never really had a realistic buyer for them and they were just taking a high risk with somebody else's capital or it was all in order the get the fees that the article mentioned them trying to charge. The article isn't clear about whether those fees are even in the contract or not, or how they overcame them.
- tsegers 4y ago
  How are they possibly not the victims after the distributor orders a vast quantity of product, goes MIA for months, and then proceeds to go "whoops, just kidding, here's your stale product back"?
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    They are victims, but also they are in business that should know what they are doing. This stuff isn't exactly uncommon if you do some research. And that is why they should have been entirely sure what they signed up for. They were not forced to enter this contract, but instead choose to.
francisofascii 4y ago
Reminds me of the “Level of Effort” field in DevOps. If you have a group of tickets with a value of LOE total of X, it could be in hours, days, or some other contrived measure.
motohagiography 4y ago
Big companies are mostly made up of small people. Small companies tend to have bigger people. If you want to become well known, stand up to the shitty ones, their complaints will do the rest for you. I think the OPs story is going to have a good ending, and I hope that broker tries to slander them because it's free marketing from someone who people in that business probably know all about already. Good luck, and nice save.
anon223345 4y ago
My friends company (software consulting) got a contract with Amex, super excited Took months for them to even respond to emails about their invoices, they never ever paid on time or even a month a late Dealing with giant firms is the worst and there’s nothing you can do as a small vendor besides having your game tight upfront and if you do have your game tight upfront they won’t hire you in most cases
- 300bps 4y ago
  I was buying a house many many years ago at a time I was self employed. I owned a computer company and my largest client put in an order for 20 computers. They had Net 30 terms with me so I said to them, "I'm very sorry, I am buying a house and can't float the money for 30 days. I can refer you to someone else to buy them from." The general manager of the company told me it was no problem, send the invoice directly to him and he would pay me the day he gets the invoice. I sent AP and the general manager the invoice and they didn't pay me for about 45 days after they received the invoice. As a result, I barely made settlement on my house - I was literally cashing in change at the bank. I had no furniture, not even a bed and slept on the floor for the first month I lived there.
  - dangero 4y ago
    Glad they actually paid. I've had similar situations where I'm still waiting for the money 5 years later (I know it's never coming)
    - monero-xmr 4y ago
      Can you sue them? People pretend it’s impossible to sue a large company but that is absolutely false, even for a few thousand dollars.
      - programmarchy 4y ago
        A few thousand dollars wouldn't be worth the time.
joegahona 4y ago
People are getting hung up on the "cases vs bags" error, but it sounds like the small-coffee people overcame that. Selfish observation: this coffee has to be close to its shelf life, despite being roasted in Jun/Jul and despite being sealed. A "one year best buy date" is unreasonably generous.
- seneca 4y ago
  > Selfish observation: this coffee has to be close to its shelf life, despite being roasted in Jun/Jul and despite being sealed. A "one year best buy date" is unreasonably generous. Certainly. Then consider the fact that this small business is now claiming they're going to ship thousands of individual cases, all sold with free shipping. That's going to take quite a while.
  - lostlogin 4y ago
    They claim a focus on quality, and one year old coffee isn’t quality. It’s probably 100x better than what most workplaces stick though, so that’s probably a humane usage.
agrocrag 4y ago
Super happy they unloaded the overstock! What an incredibly stressful time, been there before and it can feel like the world is crumbling. In a past life, I ran a small business selling lip balm to small grocery / specialty stores. It started small and then with some good ol' fashion cold calling, we got into more and more stores. Eventually direct store sales is too much for a handful of folks to operate (and if your goal is to expand outside of your local region). The next step (which they are at) was to start working with one of the big distros (I'm guessing for them it was UNFI or KeHE). You eventually get to a point where most buyers at larger store chains (Kroger, Whole Foods, etc.) eventually just want to streamline their ordering, which means moving to a distributor (also the Regional / National buyers for the categories eventually just push that way if your sales are growing rapidly). Looks like they mentally had gotten to that point and did the right thing, find and expert to take you there. If I had to guess on how this whole issue actually went down, the broker / consultant negotiated all the terms with the distro and basically they (the biz owners) didn't clearly read the contract details (putting all your trust in the expert without much verification). I was in that same position once and learning the distributors industry terms is tough to figure out without outside resources / guidance. As they write in the post, the broker basically let them down, while they equally leaned on the broker too much for obfuscating industry knowledge.
blhack 4y ago
[flagged]
vadym909 4y ago
Title ought to be “how we messed up our first large order”, but that wouldn’t help sell their inventory.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Have to do the grift you see...
- maddumb 4y ago
  [flagged]
garyfirestorm 4y ago
That font on the website. It’s almost unreadable on my phone.
bluedino 4y ago
When we worked with Mega-Mart, you were required to acknowledge all orders within a certain time period, and you also had to enter all your shipments into their system as well. All suppliers were graded by these scores etc. Errors or failure to report would end up in your company getting removed. The problem was, the people assigned to hound us for this information were using old data. They would get a report emailed to them the night before, and by the time they emailed us about it the next day, we'd have already submitted the requested information. It didn't mean anything, though. The ball was already in motion where someone at Megamart would leave a nasty voicemail to our salespeople who then reported it to the CEO who would then come down to give sales/IT/logistics a mouthful.
duxup 4y ago
This story isn't EXACTLY what occurred here but I worked for a company who was faced with a big customer interested in a deal that would roughly quadruple the amount of business that we did, possibly more. But as things went on all the assurances / up front claims from big company had exceptions. "Well that's not always the case." and the complexity and frankly our trust in this big company seemed to erode fast. Yeah they said they'd pay for the extra work we'd have to do, but it wasn't clear (specifically to me) if even they understood how much work that would be and from meeting to meeting expectations seemed to shift, sometimes wildly on the part of big company. The more clarifications we asked the weirder things got. It would take a dedicated team larger than our own company to really even approach / get a handle on these guy's problems. We passed. Told them they were too big for us and frankly we weren't setup to deal with them at their scale and potential complexity. We hoped to be one day but we just weren't there yet. They took the news well. Another similarly small company got the deal... 2 years later went bankrupt. They invested heavily to support big company, lost many of their smaller customers who were their main income (we know because they came to us), and the deal with big company failed because big company really didn't know what they wanted and ultimately should have chosen a much larger software company. Years later big company had a subsidiary that was largely independent but had some issues that our software could solve. Big company VP remembered us and told subsidiary "just hire those guys". So we got a deal in the end / handled the subsidiary's problems easily / quickly.
JackFr 4y ago
Did I miss something in the article about how this was a grift? While these guys feel like they were screwed, and sure, they might have been screwed, making an order and then cancelling it isn’t a grift. No one stole from them, and I’m not sure how the multi-billion dollar grocery distributor got any financial benefit from the whole episode.
- lazide 4y ago
  A lot of larger companies push off supply chain risk to their suppliers this way. Auto industry is notorious for it. They might order 10x what they think they’ll need to hedge a risk on their side, fully expecting to cancel 90% of them (and telling the suppliers the opposite of course), and screw all but the lucky one. And often use that as leverage on the ‘lucky’ one too.
- dang 4y ago
  If someone suggests a more accurate and neutral title that doesn't say 'grift', we can change it.
  - chihuahua 4y ago
    "Our distributor cancelled their order and we need to move 6,000 bags of decaf coffee"
    - kypro 4y ago
      They were trying move both caffeinated & decaf at time of writing.
    - dang 4y ago
      Thanks! I've used a shorter version of that so I can still squeeze in the [updated].
merb 4y ago
who even thinks that 6000 units will be bags. I mean considering that we are talking about food distribution it can't be bags. now consider aldi in the us or in germany, it has over 2k stores, consider it will send 50 bags per store (which is not a lot, but that would probably be around 2 cartons, which is fine for a start or special) it would only be possible to send it to around 120 stores, so why should they even bother? now the other way round a simple person who operates like 2 aldi stores wants to order the coffee, he would probably only need around 200 bags, so why did they even think that 6000 units are bags. its so stupid. (especially since they bothered in writing how much hours of coffee that would be...)
- chadash 4y ago
  When you sell to a big chain, they don't necessarily put the products in every store. I have a friend in the food business and when he was getting started, the big chains would put his product in a small number of stores to see how they sold before putting in larger orders.
  - merb 4y ago
    but I doubt that they would target 120 stores...
sizzle 4y ago
I see young kids working in pictures, is this legal or gray area for family run small businesses i.e. all hands on deck to help family
- roflyear 4y ago
  Guess you haven't been in a restaurant in the US lately? If their kids aren't at school they are taking orders or bussing (as young as 8yo).
irjustin 4y ago
The coffee producer was expecting a retail chain to pay $41/bag ($250k/6000) I'm glad that they were able to move the bags and save their business and themselves from all this debt, but this red flag needs to be addressed and owned up.
- golem14 4y ago
  $41 per CASE, not per bag.
  - irjustin 4y ago
    That's what it ended up being, but they thought they landed a 250k contract to do 6,000 "units" and they were surprised when those units ended up being cases mid-way through production/ordering. So, initially, they believed $41/bag....
    - golem14 4y ago
      Yes, that is right. I'm not saying that the OP was blameless. I don't understand why the first thing they did after the discovering the issue was to hound the distributor and try to renegotiate payment terms. I believe the worst would have been to loose 6000 bags, which wouldn't have been too traumatic. Edit: I haven't seen the specific order. Maybe it was written in a way that priced by bag but somehow requested UNITS in a way that the total order volume in USD wasn't clear. The story surely paints OP in a better light than the other side would, so maybe there is more to this than meets the eye. For sure, a good learning experience for those guys.
      - irjustin 4y ago
        > Maybe it was written in a way that priced by bag but somehow requested UNITS in a way that the total order volume in USD wasn't clear. If the price was listed per bag as $6.83/bag (assuming 6 bags/case) and the PO said 6,000-units, that's the "best light" scenario for the OP I can come up. There are literally zero other numbers (no totals, no total dollar value) and the only difference is in the "units" which could be overlooked. But what kind of PO doesn't have some sort of total which shows how much money the contract is expected to be worth. I don't believe this scenario exists.
manv1 4y ago
Inventory financing is a severe pain in the ass for small businesses. It makes moving up to the next level incredibly difficult. Math example: You sell something for $20, and it costs you $5. You have free shipping, which costs you $3. Shop and CC fees are maybe $2, so you're netting $10. Then taxes means you net $6. So if you sell 10,000 units you've netted $60k. But to make that $60k you need to spend $50k up front to buy the inventory, and maybe $2k more to ship the inventory to you. Then you need a place to put it, so maybe $1k/month. So when you need to order your next batch of inventory you need, say, $52k. You haven't made that much yet, because your inventory has a 2 month lead time. So you use money from the 60k in "profit" to buy inventory, leaving you no profit. At that point you haven't made anything. It looks like you're making money, but you aren't. Maybe you dip into your tax reserve fund to buy that inventory, but the fact is that you probably haven't paid yourself much, if anything. This is the brutal reality of small business math.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Depending on the industry 30 or 60 days net may help or hinder you even further.
  - szundi 4y ago
    In my country 120 days is pretty common for Metro or Tesco.
- maritimus_bear 4y ago
  [dead]
- nlh 4y ago
  The realities are brutal indeed BUT we should all be using the right terminology here: This is all about cashflow. When you say: > So you use money from the 60k in "profit" to buy inventory, leaving you no profit. That is incorrect. The business still has made a $60k profit, but they have no CASH since they had to redeploy that cash toward additional inventory (which leads to additional profits). > At that point you haven't made anything. It looks like you're making money, but you aren't. Again, sorry: You have made $60k in profits, but you're short on cash. Your business is making money -- you now have the next batch of inventory paid for and you were able to afford that with the profits from the previous batch. Those are real assets, But your business is indeed short on cash -- this is where revolving credit lines and similar financings come into play (which carry a cost and complexity of their own). It's definitely a challenge!
paxys 4y ago
How on earth do you accept an order for X “units” without ever double checking what a unit means? Even if it was really individual bags, wouldn’t you at least want to know what weight the distributor expects? They use the word “grift” so many times, but really it was just stupidity on their part. It’s your job to understand how the industry you are entering works. The only grift is this fake sob story to get sympathy and get rid of excess inventory (and of course the internet ate it up).
lisper 4y ago
Others have pointed this out, but no one has actually done the math yet, so... 6000 "units" for $250,000 is $41/unit. At wholesale. For a product that retails for $16/bag. It is just inconceivable that no one noticed this discrepancy. This is not a "grift" by the distributor, this is an elementary and obvious fuckup by the producer. In fact, it's so elementary and obvious that it would not surprise me a bit if this whole thing turns out to be a publicity stunt that succeeded spectacularly well, at least for a little while, because once the cat is out of the bag all the people who bought that coffee will realize that they are the ones who got played.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Ancalagon 4y ago
  Something something high quality, ethically-sourced coffee? (I don’t actually know the details of those descriptions. Playing devils advocate it sounded to me like they were trying to run a very ethical, environmentally friendly, health-focused business from the start, which is expensive as far as I can tell in the US, so maybe those prices made sense.)
  - powera 4y ago
    The point is that a "unit" could not possibly have been a $16 bag of coffee, if they were getting paid $41 per unit. The story smells fake to me. The most charitable interpretation is that they were misled by their "food broker" more than they realize even now.
    - chasd00 4y ago
      maybe they gave the broker their AMEX to pay not realizing the broker makes their money on commission. heh although that would be an even more inconceivable mistake than the dollar discrepancy.
  - marcinzm 4y ago
    They seem to sell the bags on their website for ~$15 so they should know that someone selling them for at least 3x the price is odd.
spencerchubb 4y ago
TLDR they had a miscommunication about the units. They thought they were getting 6,000 bags of coffee, but it was 6,000 cases with 6 bags each. In school, every class that involves numbers always stresses the importance of units. This is a good real-life example of how important units are, but easy to stumble on.
tapatio 4y ago
Direct to Consumer is the way to go. The silver lining here is that you guys got massive exposure with this fiasco and hopefully won't have to partner with (multi)national corps to sell coffee in the future.
astrange 4y ago
The coffee supply chain seems to have a lot of people claiming to add value who don’t really. Does this business need to be saved because the customer really cares they specifically roasted and bagged some beans they got? No, the coffee bush did all the work. And yet we never meet or thank it. (The farm workers go second. The James Harrison video you learned your coffee making technique from is third.)
WesternWind 4y ago
They still have incredibly priced decaf if you want it.
annoyingnoob 4y ago
I'm wondering if firing the broker is what nuked the deal. The broker told his contact to walk away and offered something else, no doubt.
ChuckMcM 4y ago
Ouch. As others have pointed out, there were a number of missteps that compounded the problem but it is a nice after action report and ideally these guys have learned three things: 1) There is no such thing as asking too many questions. 2) Legal advice is expensive, getting into a bad contract more so, as a result make sure that you understand exactly what the contract says, and what "bad things" it is protecting you and them from. 3) Distributors don't make "big orders", their customers do. If a distributor tells you they have a big order then talk directly to the customer making the order about it. If the distributor won't tell you the customer then don't do the deal. It looks like they survived this semester in "advanced logistics" and that will make them a much better company overall by incorporating that learning into their processes. One of the interesting things about being at Sun from "startup" to "enterprise company" was seeing first hand the stupid mistakes that didn't kill them but they successfully learned from. I am convinced this is part of the "business experience" for everyone but couldn't prove that from my own experience (I might just pick companies to join that learn things by pain :-)
jeromenerf 4y ago
Hmm. Between Finagle and Hanson, I chose Hanlon. It would have been a shame for this coffee to go stale. Oh, “roasted in July”, so Finagle then.
- lostlogin 4y ago
  That was my thought too. That’s some very old coffee - after 2-3 weeks in stale by my taste.
LaserToy 4y ago
Uff, was able to get decaf and hopefully make a new year a bit more tolerable! Happy New Years!
charlie0 4y ago
No one has pointed this out. These guys are selling high end coffee. They also admitted this was their largest order by far. Where are they getting this high end coffee from? Is there an unlimited supply of this coffee somewhere? The cynic in me suspects some of that coffee might not even be what's advertised.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Is the product so unique after all if their own supplier can match to over doubling their demand. In probably rather short time frame...
- Niksko 4y ago
  There's high end and then there's high end. I don't know this roaster well, but I can take a stab at how this works, based on roasters local to me. The absolute biggest and best roasters have relationships and locked-in supply or exclusivity with farmers. They're also likely re-investing profits in those farmers. There are a very small number of roasters of this scale and sophistication, and they're probably already the ones in national retailers. Everyone else is buying high quality but still commodity green coffee and roasting it. The first group is able to get higher quality and guaranteed supply because of the deep relationships. They're excellent roasters, but they also are able to attain a higher level of quality because of the garbage in garbage out principle. Everyone else is competing on who can do the best job of roasting the same product. Important, but not quite the same. I can't say that this company falls into the second category for sure. But if they do, that explains how they can get lots more supply very quickly. Their coffee is high end, they're doing a good job of roasting it, but it's not so high end that there isn't a bunch more green supply that they can get.
dcj4 4y ago
Coffee must be fresh to taste good, months old coffee is rubbish.
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
Lmao you guys just got grifted into buying 30k bags of coffee from these guys
dwightgunning 4y ago
> This coffee is still good. It was roasted in June and July 2022 with a one year best buy date. Still good but hardly fresh for a specialty. Anyway. There’s a 6x number in here that somebody (or somebodies) completely missed… Seems like what they thought was a fair-to-good deal was actually a such a terrible deal that, given their incorrect definition of a unit, the numbers in their model lined up. That might be something the consultant could have spotted, since they’d seen the numbers around previous deals. I’m not sure it’s their duty/obligation to.
- HiroshiSan 4y ago
  > Still good but hardly fresh for a specialty. Was going to say this, I work at a specialty coffee shop and anything over 2-3 weeks is unusable.
epicureanideal 4y ago
Anyone know a good resource (book, video, whatever) about starting a small business, including approximate customer or revenue growth rates and mechanisms to get customers? So much I’ve been reading is for high growth startups and I wonder what the other end of the growth distribution is supposed to look like. How to know a slightly profitable hobby from a growing small business, for example?
SnowHill9902 4y ago
This is why you abolish the word “unit” in your factory. “Unit” has no actual meaning. It’s just a filler word for an object that you should be mentioning explicitly.
the_cat_kittles 4y ago
i neither trust nor have sympathy for anyone in the situation. i guess its because any inter-business negotiation / transaction should be assumed to be hostile since its generally close to a zero sum game, or partially one. you are trying to buy some goods / services to then sell for a profit, or you are trying to sell some goods or services for a profit that you already made. its the same as flipping something at a yard sale- sometimes you get screwed, and its basically always your fault. i guess your post reads like you think you are a well behaved consumer buying stuff at a retailer with good customer service. which is an impossibly naive or deliberately false point of view. and of course, the fact that your whole goal of writing these posts was to sell the coffee, and it worked, makes your aw shucks routine all the more suspicious. i have been screwed many times in the world of manufacturing, no one ever complains like this, you either have recourse or you eat it and dont feel bad for yourself. edit: on top of that you are selling coffee, something that is already well provided everywhere. it would be different if there was some element of charity or necessity, but your endeavor is purely a profit seeking one (with no negative externalities, id consider it neutral to everyone else) which furthers the mismatch between your tone and reality edit 2: of course i think its a dick move by someone to order a bunch, then reneg. but if you werent aware of that risk, you are just stupid, especially if your going to spend 250k
boplicity 4y ago
Classic copywriting. No wonder they sold it all out. People love a good story, and a "reason why" they can get a good deal. Amazing to see so many people engaging deeply with the story, and not even notice how incredibly effective the sales pitch is.
vivegi 4y ago
Unit of Measure confusion across varied supply chains is a real problem. Here is an anecdote from past experience. This is from the healthcare sector. Our client builds and installs systems for supply chain management in hospitals in North America and Europe. Think of hospitals ordering syringes, needles, gloves, implants etc., There are a zillion suppliers providing tons of SKUs and products will have multiple vendors supplying them (for supply risk management). Each product from a supplier also has multiple variants -- for eg: gloves could be in sizes Medium and Large etc., At the point of ordering (eg: the nurses' station) the hospital would have setup a mapping of the logical product SKU (eg: Medium Nitrile gloves) to two or three product item codes specific to each vendor. The hospital's material management system takes care of the local inventory management and reordering. While most of the ordering happens through electronic systems, there are still orders originating through <gasp>faxes</gasp>! It is a small fraction of the total orders placed, but it is non-zero and fulfilling them is critical. Many times, the nurses maintain thick binders full of product catalog listings and ordering procedures specific to the hospital's preferred/certified vendors. Most of the time, the exception process is to hand fill a form and fax the order to the vendor designated fax number. (Yes, it still happens in 2022/23). In the backend, the faxed order has to be entered (ie., entered into the supplier's ERP system). Our company was doing the order entry for these faxed orders. Once we received an order from a hospital in a small European country. The order was for "baby blankets" or something similar that is used in a Neonatal ICU. Long story short, due to a two character error in translating the unit of measure from "EA" (i.e., Each = single unit) the hospital's unloading dock received two truck full of cases of baby blankets, enough to exceed the total annual birth-rate of that small European country. True story.
xiaosun 4y ago
>>To make this order happen, we had to take $45,000 in personal loans from friends and family, $65,000 in business credit card debt, $35,000 from a business loan, $60,000 in personal credit card debt, $20,000 in outstanding invoice debt, and $11,000 in loans from us personally to the business, for a total of $216,000 in debt. I don't find myself very sympathetic. Feels like there is plenty of evidence that the business owners here aren't the most diligent or detailed oriented. $45k+$65k+$35k+$60k+$20k+$11k adds up to $236k Best case this is the result of their own naivety/incompetence, worse case this is just a distasteful marketing ploy. >>Mid July, after 6 weeks of roasting 21 hours a day on the roaster in 3 shifts, working 12-16 hour days, regularly working until 11 pm to finish bagging and boxing. Despite this work schedule, had no problem releasing their weekly hour-long podcasts every week in June/July.
- xiaosun 4y ago
  https://www.nobadreviewspodcast.com/episodes/ https://www.nobadreviewspodcast.com/episodes/ Podcast website
- flutas 4y ago
  > I don't find myself very sympathetic. Feels like there is plenty of evidence that the business owners here aren't the most diligent or detailed oriented. > $45k+$65k+$35k+$60k+$20k+$11k adds up to $236k $20k of that, as called out by them is invoice debt. Aka they will are owed that amount but amount, they just have yet to get it from the distributor. Leaving them with the $216k number given. > $20,000 in outstanding invoice debt
  - xiaosun 4y ago
    So why include this figure and call it a "total of $216,000 in debt" that excludes the $20k? It's either intentionally misleading or lack of diligence in presenting the numbers.
scabros 4y ago
I got tired of reading "expert" opinions in this thread... All throwing numbers that "don't add up", but at the same time confusing some elements of the story to make it sound as "fake". Sometimes, there are just hard workers seeing an opportunity to grow after years of waiting and fighting. You see the deal, it sounds risky but you think you can do it and maybe it can change your life... You trust the wrong person, don't do your double checking, and boom, it just explodes in your face. Maybe that would never happen to this "experts", but it could definitely happen to me.
silexia 4y ago
It is super important to name the actual parties here. Who is the food broker? Who is the distributor? Otherwise, bad behaviors continue.

402 points by oftenwrong 4y ago

It seems like a lot people here aren't reading the full post. All the numbers and the situation are laid out.

When I was homeless, I found a job with a "call center". Our training consisted of teaching us the cover story and how to handle reactions to it. We began with a joke involving alcohol. Then if they didn't hang up we launched into the pitch: "We just lost our lease on our warehouse, and we've got to move all these pens. You can get them imprinted with your name and phone number for a bargain. What do you say?" I quit within 3 days because I'm not a liar.

sva_ 4y ago
I am curious about the joke involving alcohol.
- odysseus 4y ago
  If alcohol can damage your short term memory imagine the damage alcohol can do
- Eleison23 4y ago
  [dead]
- projektfu 4y ago
  The answer was posted but for some reason was flagged. Did someone take offense?
DaveExeter 4y ago
That's more what I would call "strategic misinformation". Ok, ok, it's a scam, but a very common scam! Similar to the white van scam. They really should teach people about these scams in school.
adolph 4y ago
Was second prize a set of steak knives?
- JimtheCoder 4y ago
  Parent comment didn't actually quit, he just got third prize...
  - adolph 4y ago
    Could have quit while driving away in the caddy
raverbashing 4y ago
This sounds like a variation of the toner scam

georgeburdell 4y ago

One thing that irks me about dealing with big businesses, that the post touches on, is payment terms. If I buy an item, I pay for it immediately (or if it’s large enough, a creditor pays for me). Big companies pay with IOUs that say they’ll give you cash later, say 30-90 days from now or after criterion X is fulfilled. They do not care if you’re a small company with poor liquidity. I think it’s absolutely abusive behavior

jraby3 4y ago
That’s more specific to the food business. I run an advertising company and we always take payment in advance and work with several large (publicly traded) companies.
- georgeburdell 4y ago
  I have experience in the semiconductor industry and it operates similarly to what the post described
- hgsgm 4y ago
  Amazon's retail profit comes from investing the money they postpone paying suppliers until 30+days after the customer pays Amazon.
- convolvatron 4y ago
  more specific to the physical goods business. if we establish a relationship where I'm regularly ordering merchandise from you - invariably we set up a regular billing cycle w/ a 30 day payment-from-invoice.
- imroot 4y ago
  I know of a few retailers that operate on Net 270 terms for their smaller vendors (Looking at you, Home Depot) and Walmart would tell us that they would reset the 'calendar' if we would call and ask for the status of a payment. This was 2003-2006ish, for the record.
  - 4y ago

johnchristopher 4y ago

> Then, 3 weeks into the process, with the orders still coming, Marcus pointedly asked him about why they were ordering so much more than the 6,000 bags they had originally predicted. The food broker laughed and said “I wondered why you’ve been so upset and concerned. When they said ‘units’, that was cases. They’re right on target so far.” You can imagine how we felt in that moment, realizing that the person we hired to make this a smooth transition and to guide us and to tell us the things we don’t know failed to ever ask us if we were ready for a 36,000 bag order. This is equivalent to a year and a half’s worth of coffee for us. We would NEVER have agreed to this had we known. It was more than we could physically or financially handle. We immediately severed our relationship with this food broker figuring at this point we were better off figuring this out without him. > “I wondered why you’ve been so upset and concerned. When they said ‘units’, that was cases. Ouch. I get a lot of flak at work and at home when I get irritated that people don't use the right words and terms and this story won't change my attitude. Eg: - "we want a new tab on the website" -> they want a new subdomain with a whole new CMS and a link in menus of every site - "we want a new site to highlight this thing" -> they want a single page with a photo and a paragraph but want to be able to change it themselves at will

HillRat 4y ago
One thing that I came back to time and time again while consulting is that most operational problems are, in whole or in part, language problems, in the Wittgenstein sense. I worked with a lot of clients to define and document “linguistic boundaries” in their organizations where terms could abruptly change their meanings, and then used that to help silos communicate more effectively with each other.
- halkony 4y ago
  Can you provide good reading, books, etc on this skill? I'm a junior dev and I notice this everywhere in my org. I'm just dipping my toes into DDD by Evans but it's a bit opaque to me.
  - HillRat 4y ago

treis 4y ago

This doesn't really make a lot of sense. How can bags be mistaken for cases when negotiating a deal? The price would be different by an order of magnitude. Why would orders trickle in like this if the product isn't getting shipped from the distributor and sold? Maybe I'm overly cynical and wary of things on the internet but somethings not adding up here.

davidmurdoch 4y ago
It probably went something like "we can do $5.00 per unit, sold in cases of 6" "Ok, we'll order 6000 at that price"
- SkipperCat 4y ago
  Yes, but at some point a purchase order has to be drafted and a contract has to be signed. Those things should be spelled out in detail. I'd think the big company would almost demand that or else the coffee roaster could ship 6000 zip lock baggies with 10 coffee beans in each. I know that's an absurd example but a PO and contract protects everyone against that and that's why any reasonable company doesn't proceed without defined terms.
  - jfranche 4y ago
    Possibly this is the real reason the order was cancelled. Once the unit/case thing was figured out, the distributor realized they’d have to pay 6x more or the seller realized they were getting paid 6x less. The deal fell apart.
- treis 4y ago
  Sure, but when the order comes written down something would be wrong. Either you would have: 6,000 units @ $30 per unit Or 36,000 units @ $5 per unit You can't have: 6,000 units @ $5 per unit with the expectation that you're going to get 6,000 cases
kioleanu 4y ago
probably „Can you move 6000 units?” “Yes we can move 6000 units at 10$ per pound” “Sounds great, get them going!”

viburnum 4y ago

I can't put my finger on it exactly but there's something about this story that isn't making sense.

yellow_lead 4y ago
Like agreeing to contract terms you are entirely unable to uphold?
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Or understanding exactly what you are signing up for and what is in the papers you sign. And what does each and every term used mean.
- kulshan 4y ago
  They didn't even understand the terms they agreed to. The distributor didn't "grift" them. They weren't swindled, it was just bad business decision making and lack of understanding their terms.
  - ArmandTanzarian 4y ago
    Perhaps not a grift, but surely the guy who arranged this deal (who they have since ceased doing business with) could have more clearly communicated to them to what it was they were agreeing. There are multiple points of failure, and it seems the company accepted the crippling responsibility on their end.
    - yellow_lead 4y ago
      I understand that but unless he is an attorney he has no business explaining contract terms to you. Always read contracts yourself or have an attorney read them.
  - mattkrause 4y ago
    Sure, but this definitely happens. In college, I worked in a lab that used disposable pipette tips to measure/move samples around, which come in small "racks" like these https://www.coleparmer.ca/i/thermo-fisher-molecular-bioproducts-a22221prx-mbp-universal-fit-pipette-tips-1000-ul-3-racks-x-200-tips/2571164 https://www.coleparmer.ca/i/thermo-fisher-molecular-bioprodu... We normally got a copy-paper box or two of these at a time, which lasted for a few months. However, one day one of my colleagues, who did not grow up speaking English, placed the order and asked for a huge number of cases, thinking "case" was a synonym for the individual plastic boxes that they came in. It...was not, as we found out when a delivery man appeared up with a motorized pallet jack. He's a bit miffed too: "Is there an easier way to bring up the rest?" The order ended up filling an entire closet and then some. They were still working through them when I left a year later. In retrospect, the price was obviously too high, but it was a small part of a big equipment order--and science stuff is often eye-wateringly expensive anyway.

AlbertCory 4y ago

Sigh. Big business vs. the little guy. I recall when I took basic accounting, we learned that common payment terms were "2/10, net/30" meaning "2% off if you pay within 10 days, and it's all due within 30 days." So it was common practice to wait 30 days (or more) and still take the 2% off. This is in no way blaming the victim, but "for a total of $216,000 in debt" I would hope I'd just say, "no, we're not doing that." One of those hard calls that nothing in business school can prepare you for.

JimtheCoder 4y ago
"One of those hard calls that nothing in business school can prepare you for." Do you really need a business school education to see that this was a mess right from the beginning, though? It sucks for the small business owner, but at the same time...if you sign one of the largest contracts of your businesses life and are not even sure that you are selling individual bags of coffee or cases of bags of coffee... No business school is going to help that level of dumb...
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  did I not say that?
  - JimtheCoder 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - AlbertCory 4y ago
      Ok. I was being charitable to them. Naïve people get themselves into this stuff all the time.
- corgi609 4y ago
  If you read, the contract was not for the goods, the contract was about the policies of getting paid. The units was an estimate from the distributor about what was going to be needed later. There wasn't a contract about the goods. That's not how it works with a distributor anyways. The distributor is invoiced for the goods that they order, as they order them, and if you read the story, there were several orders. There is not a contract for all of the goods.

asah 4y ago

It's 101 that wholesale buyers order by the case and for producers to specify the casecount and price, and for errors like this to be caught when the prices/etc don't line up. This is equivalent to not knowing that URLs can redirect, or that http:// http:// and https:// https:// aren't the same thing. Distributors work with 1000 brands each and don't have time (or margin) to babysit. Also, when a company gets a much larger and different customer, I would expect any CEO to pickup the phone and talk with peers about how to manage the process. Brokers are outsourced commissioned reps, not shareholders.

sva_ 4y ago
> It's 101 that wholesale buyers order by the case and for producers to specify the casecount and price, Not sure why you're being downvoted because thats standard in wolesale. Not sure how they couldn't catch that when looking at the price either. Maybe they thought they'd sell a lot less for the same price and aren't talking about this?
- Enginerrrd 4y ago
  Reading their description, there is no real point in which anyone takes real ownership of this mistake and so something like this is probably likely to catch them again. Did the consultant drop the ball? Yes, but so did they, in a pretty big way. Still, I've run businesses and when you're trying to bootstrap without experience this kind of thing does happen.
  - 88913527 4y ago
    If you are unsure to what extent you can or cannot depend on the consultant, you might as well do all the work yourself at that point. They cannot add value to the process; they could have not paid the consultant and worked directly with the grocery distributor. The addition of the consultant led to a delegative mindset ("I'm paying someone to handle that problem") that ultimately didn't pan out for them.
    - deleted 4y ago

timerol 4y ago

Great to see that all of these got sold! The numbers in this story don't exactly line up, in a way that tells a fun and clearly stressful story: (The cases have 6 bags each.) The intro to the blog post mentions 34k bags of coffee actually made. The initial order was thought to be 6k bags of coffee, but was actually 6k cases = 36k bags of coffee. So it looks like some got sold off between the delivery fiasco and the blog post. Later in the blog post it's mentioned as approximately 30k bags sold for half off + free shipping. It looks like at time of writing there are $5277 in donations at $50/case, so 630 bags from the fundraiser. The Fire Sale has sold out at 24k bags, short of their original 30k bag goal. (Edit: They sold out of all of the caffeinated coffee, not all of the decaf.) They raised between $173k (all $7 bags + donations) and $197k (all $8 bags + donations), not counting the substantial shipping costs for 4k cases of coffee. The debt likely to be paid off first is $60k of personal credit cards, $65k of business credit cards, and $45k of personal loans (there's a social cost to keeping these after such a successful fundraiser). $170k total here, leaving the $66k of other debt to be paid off more gradually. (Edit: They only have decaf left from the sale coffees. The 4k bags not put up for sale, and some remaining decaf, are all of their excess inventory. Ignore following paragraph) ~~I'm guessing that they chose to keep the extra inventory after seeing the wild and immediate success of the sale. Knowing that they can pay off their worst debt, and getting a ton of new customers as well, they'd rather have the extra 6k bags around to sell at normal prices. It's also possible that they sold out of one type of coffee first, and that helped them decide to shut down the sale, rather than keeping it updated with the different varieties still in stock.~~ Modest Coffee now seems poised to be successful. Extra stock, no longer extra warehousing space needed, exposure to a ton of new customers, and their worst debts paid. I wouldn't be surprised if they look back on this fiasco as their biggest success in a few years.

JimtheCoder 4y ago
"I wouldn't be surprised if they look back on this fiasco as their biggest success in a few years." Wouldn't that imply that they would be doing even worse in the future?
- timerol 4y ago

wutheringh 4y ago

Is this grifting? How did the distributor benefit?

spcebar 4y ago
The distributer said, "actually we don't need this much, so either take back this enormous amount of coffee that we know you can't handle or give it to us for free and you can "write it off on taxes," which leaves the coffee company screwed on their loans. When the coffee company says they want to take it back, the big company tries to make them pay an enormous fee. The grift, as I understand it, is in the distributor saying they needed X and then saying they didn't need it and giving them two shitty options for how to proceed.
- seneca 4y ago
  Those options were explicitly laid out in the contract they signed, they even say that in the blog post. It's not a grift if they tell you up front exactly what will happen.
  - halkony 4y ago
    I'm happy they were able to move their stock, but yeah. Something got signed with these terms in it. So you need to account for the possibility or have it renegotiated. This sounds like the business equivalent of college advisors. They had an advisor who was probably well meaning but couldn't fully accommodate the young company because of ignorance/inability/whatever and now they're deep in a decision they never would have made. $5-10k in a decent retainer would likely have prevented this.
    - Espressosaurus 4y ago
      I'm not convinced of well-meaning. I've seen this same scam happen with a different distributor in a different domain. This is the classic "if you owe the bank $1000 you have a problem, if you owe the bank $1 billion the bank has a problem". And thanks to the net N terms + control of the end client, you're the bank.

seneca 4y ago

This isn't grifting, and if they had specified the distributor it would be libel. This is a story about a small business that made a lot of bad decisions and got in way over theirs heads. That's all well and good, but the spin to try to make themselves look like victims is pretty disingenuous. This sounds like the story you get from a teenager about how it's everyone else's fault after they're caught red handed doing something wrong.

bombcar 4y ago
Exactly. And if you deal with (shitty) small businesses you’ll hear this or variants time and time again. Part of the reason Walmart has crushed all their small business competitors.
nebulous1 4y ago
Yeah. I guess it could be grift if the distributor never really had a realistic buyer for them and they were just taking a high risk with somebody else's capital or it was all in order the get the fees that the article mentioned them trying to charge. The article isn't clear about whether those fees are even in the contract or not, or how they overcame them.
tsegers 4y ago
How are they possibly not the victims after the distributor orders a vast quantity of product, goes MIA for months, and then proceeds to go "whoops, just kidding, here's your stale product back"?
- Ekaros 4y ago
  They are victims, but also they are in business that should know what they are doing. This stuff isn't exactly uncommon if you do some research. And that is why they should have been entirely sure what they signed up for. They were not forced to enter this contract, but instead choose to.

francisofascii 4y ago

Reminds me of the “Level of Effort” field in DevOps. If you have a group of tickets with a value of LOE total of X, it could be in hours, days, or some other contrived measure.

motohagiography 4y ago

Big companies are mostly made up of small people. Small companies tend to have bigger people. If you want to become well known, stand up to the shitty ones, their complaints will do the rest for you. I think the OPs story is going to have a good ending, and I hope that broker tries to slander them because it's free marketing from someone who people in that business probably know all about already. Good luck, and nice save.

anon223345 4y ago

My friends company (software consulting) got a contract with Amex, super excited Took months for them to even respond to emails about their invoices, they never ever paid on time or even a month a late Dealing with giant firms is the worst and there’s nothing you can do as a small vendor besides having your game tight upfront and if you do have your game tight upfront they won’t hire you in most cases

300bps 4y ago
I was buying a house many many years ago at a time I was self employed. I owned a computer company and my largest client put in an order for 20 computers. They had Net 30 terms with me so I said to them, "I'm very sorry, I am buying a house and can't float the money for 30 days. I can refer you to someone else to buy them from." The general manager of the company told me it was no problem, send the invoice directly to him and he would pay me the day he gets the invoice. I sent AP and the general manager the invoice and they didn't pay me for about 45 days after they received the invoice. As a result, I barely made settlement on my house - I was literally cashing in change at the bank. I had no furniture, not even a bed and slept on the floor for the first month I lived there.
- dangero 4y ago
  Glad they actually paid. I've had similar situations where I'm still waiting for the money 5 years later (I know it's never coming)
  - monero-xmr 4y ago
    Can you sue them? People pretend it’s impossible to sue a large company but that is absolutely false, even for a few thousand dollars.
    - programmarchy 4y ago
      A few thousand dollars wouldn't be worth the time.

joegahona 4y ago

People are getting hung up on the "cases vs bags" error, but it sounds like the small-coffee people overcame that. Selfish observation: this coffee has to be close to its shelf life, despite being roasted in Jun/Jul and despite being sealed. A "one year best buy date" is unreasonably generous.

seneca 4y ago
> Selfish observation: this coffee has to be close to its shelf life, despite being roasted in Jun/Jul and despite being sealed. A "one year best buy date" is unreasonably generous. Certainly. Then consider the fact that this small business is now claiming they're going to ship thousands of individual cases, all sold with free shipping. That's going to take quite a while.
- lostlogin 4y ago
  They claim a focus on quality, and one year old coffee isn’t quality. It’s probably 100x better than what most workplaces stick though, so that’s probably a humane usage.

agrocrag 4y ago

Super happy they unloaded the overstock! What an incredibly stressful time, been there before and it can feel like the world is crumbling. In a past life, I ran a small business selling lip balm to small grocery / specialty stores. It started small and then with some good ol' fashion cold calling, we got into more and more stores. Eventually direct store sales is too much for a handful of folks to operate (and if your goal is to expand outside of your local region). The next step (which they are at) was to start working with one of the big distros (I'm guessing for them it was UNFI or KeHE). You eventually get to a point where most buyers at larger store chains (Kroger, Whole Foods, etc.) eventually just want to streamline their ordering, which means moving to a distributor (also the Regional / National buyers for the categories eventually just push that way if your sales are growing rapidly). Looks like they mentally had gotten to that point and did the right thing, find and expert to take you there. If I had to guess on how this whole issue actually went down, the broker / consultant negotiated all the terms with the distro and basically they (the biz owners) didn't clearly read the contract details (putting all your trust in the expert without much verification). I was in that same position once and learning the distributors industry terms is tough to figure out without outside resources / guidance. As they write in the post, the broker basically let them down, while they equally leaned on the broker too much for obfuscating industry knowledge.

blhack 4y ago

[flagged]

vadym909 4y ago

Title ought to be “how we messed up our first large order”, but that wouldn’t help sell their inventory.

Ekaros 4y ago
Have to do the grift you see...
maddumb 4y ago
[flagged]

garyfirestorm 4y ago

That font on the website. It’s almost unreadable on my phone.

bluedino 4y ago

When we worked with Mega-Mart, you were required to acknowledge all orders within a certain time period, and you also had to enter all your shipments into their system as well. All suppliers were graded by these scores etc. Errors or failure to report would end up in your company getting removed. The problem was, the people assigned to hound us for this information were using old data. They would get a report emailed to them the night before, and by the time they emailed us about it the next day, we'd have already submitted the requested information. It didn't mean anything, though. The ball was already in motion where someone at Megamart would leave a nasty voicemail to our salespeople who then reported it to the CEO who would then come down to give sales/IT/logistics a mouthful.

duxup 4y ago

This story isn't EXACTLY what occurred here but I worked for a company who was faced with a big customer interested in a deal that would roughly quadruple the amount of business that we did, possibly more. But as things went on all the assurances / up front claims from big company had exceptions. "Well that's not always the case." and the complexity and frankly our trust in this big company seemed to erode fast. Yeah they said they'd pay for the extra work we'd have to do, but it wasn't clear (specifically to me) if even they understood how much work that would be and from meeting to meeting expectations seemed to shift, sometimes wildly on the part of big company. The more clarifications we asked the weirder things got. It would take a dedicated team larger than our own company to really even approach / get a handle on these guy's problems. We passed. Told them they were too big for us and frankly we weren't setup to deal with them at their scale and potential complexity. We hoped to be one day but we just weren't there yet. They took the news well. Another similarly small company got the deal... 2 years later went bankrupt. They invested heavily to support big company, lost many of their smaller customers who were their main income (we know because they came to us), and the deal with big company failed because big company really didn't know what they wanted and ultimately should have chosen a much larger software company. Years later big company had a subsidiary that was largely independent but had some issues that our software could solve. Big company VP remembered us and told subsidiary "just hire those guys". So we got a deal in the end / handled the subsidiary's problems easily / quickly.

JackFr 4y ago

Did I miss something in the article about how this was a grift? While these guys feel like they were screwed, and sure, they might have been screwed, making an order and then cancelling it isn’t a grift. No one stole from them, and I’m not sure how the multi-billion dollar grocery distributor got any financial benefit from the whole episode.

lazide 4y ago
A lot of larger companies push off supply chain risk to their suppliers this way. Auto industry is notorious for it. They might order 10x what they think they’ll need to hedge a risk on their side, fully expecting to cancel 90% of them (and telling the suppliers the opposite of course), and screw all but the lucky one. And often use that as leverage on the ‘lucky’ one too.
dang 4y ago
If someone suggests a more accurate and neutral title that doesn't say 'grift', we can change it.
- chihuahua 4y ago
  "Our distributor cancelled their order and we need to move 6,000 bags of decaf coffee"
  - kypro 4y ago
    They were trying move both caffeinated & decaf at time of writing.
  - dang 4y ago
    Thanks! I've used a shorter version of that so I can still squeeze in the [updated].

merb 4y ago

who even thinks that 6000 units will be bags. I mean considering that we are talking about food distribution it can't be bags. now consider aldi in the us or in germany, it has over 2k stores, consider it will send 50 bags per store (which is not a lot, but that would probably be around 2 cartons, which is fine for a start or special) it would only be possible to send it to around 120 stores, so why should they even bother? now the other way round a simple person who operates like 2 aldi stores wants to order the coffee, he would probably only need around 200 bags, so why did they even think that 6000 units are bags. its so stupid. (especially since they bothered in writing how much hours of coffee that would be...)

chadash 4y ago
When you sell to a big chain, they don't necessarily put the products in every store. I have a friend in the food business and when he was getting started, the big chains would put his product in a small number of stores to see how they sold before putting in larger orders.
- merb 4y ago
  but I doubt that they would target 120 stores...

sizzle 4y ago

I see young kids working in pictures, is this legal or gray area for family run small businesses i.e. all hands on deck to help family

roflyear 4y ago
Guess you haven't been in a restaurant in the US lately? If their kids aren't at school they are taking orders or bussing (as young as 8yo).

irjustin 4y ago

The coffee producer was expecting a retail chain to pay $41/bag ($250k/6000) I'm glad that they were able to move the bags and save their business and themselves from all this debt, but this red flag needs to be addressed and owned up.

golem14 4y ago
$41 per CASE, not per bag.
- irjustin 4y ago
  That's what it ended up being, but they thought they landed a 250k contract to do 6,000 "units" and they were surprised when those units ended up being cases mid-way through production/ordering. So, initially, they believed $41/bag....
  - golem14 4y ago
    Yes, that is right. I'm not saying that the OP was blameless. I don't understand why the first thing they did after the discovering the issue was to hound the distributor and try to renegotiate payment terms. I believe the worst would have been to loose 6000 bags, which wouldn't have been too traumatic. Edit: I haven't seen the specific order. Maybe it was written in a way that priced by bag but somehow requested UNITS in a way that the total order volume in USD wasn't clear. The story surely paints OP in a better light than the other side would, so maybe there is more to this than meets the eye. For sure, a good learning experience for those guys.
    - irjustin 4y ago
      > Maybe it was written in a way that priced by bag but somehow requested UNITS in a way that the total order volume in USD wasn't clear. If the price was listed per bag as $6.83/bag (assuming 6 bags/case) and the PO said 6,000-units, that's the "best light" scenario for the OP I can come up. There are literally zero other numbers (no totals, no total dollar value) and the only difference is in the "units" which could be overlooked. But what kind of PO doesn't have some sort of total which shows how much money the contract is expected to be worth. I don't believe this scenario exists.

manv1 4y ago

Inventory financing is a severe pain in the ass for small businesses. It makes moving up to the next level incredibly difficult. Math example: You sell something for $20, and it costs you $5. You have free shipping, which costs you $3. Shop and CC fees are maybe $2, so you're netting $10. Then taxes means you net $6. So if you sell 10,000 units you've netted $60k. But to make that $60k you need to spend $50k up front to buy the inventory, and maybe $2k more to ship the inventory to you. Then you need a place to put it, so maybe $1k/month. So when you need to order your next batch of inventory you need, say, $52k. You haven't made that much yet, because your inventory has a 2 month lead time. So you use money from the 60k in "profit" to buy inventory, leaving you no profit. At that point you haven't made anything. It looks like you're making money, but you aren't. Maybe you dip into your tax reserve fund to buy that inventory, but the fact is that you probably haven't paid yourself much, if anything. This is the brutal reality of small business math.

jacquesm 4y ago
Depending on the industry 30 or 60 days net may help or hinder you even further.
- szundi 4y ago
  In my country 120 days is pretty common for Metro or Tesco.
maritimus_bear 4y ago
[dead]
nlh 4y ago
The realities are brutal indeed BUT we should all be using the right terminology here: This is all about cashflow. When you say: > So you use money from the 60k in "profit" to buy inventory, leaving you no profit. That is incorrect. The business still has made a $60k profit, but they have no CASH since they had to redeploy that cash toward additional inventory (which leads to additional profits). > At that point you haven't made anything. It looks like you're making money, but you aren't. Again, sorry: You have made $60k in profits, but you're short on cash. Your business is making money -- you now have the next batch of inventory paid for and you were able to afford that with the profits from the previous batch. Those are real assets, But your business is indeed short on cash -- this is where revolving credit lines and similar financings come into play (which carry a cost and complexity of their own). It's definitely a challenge!

paxys 4y ago

How on earth do you accept an order for X “units” without ever double checking what a unit means? Even if it was really individual bags, wouldn’t you at least want to know what weight the distributor expects? They use the word “grift” so many times, but really it was just stupidity on their part. It’s your job to understand how the industry you are entering works. The only grift is this fake sob story to get sympathy and get rid of excess inventory (and of course the internet ate it up).

lisper 4y ago

Others have pointed this out, but no one has actually done the math yet, so... 6000 "units" for $250,000 is $41/unit. At wholesale. For a product that retails for $16/bag. It is just inconceivable that no one noticed this discrepancy. This is not a "grift" by the distributor, this is an elementary and obvious fuckup by the producer. In fact, it's so elementary and obvious that it would not surprise me a bit if this whole thing turns out to be a publicity stunt that succeeded spectacularly well, at least for a little while, because once the cat is out of the bag all the people who bought that coffee will realize that they are the ones who got played.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Ancalagon 4y ago
Something something high quality, ethically-sourced coffee? (I don’t actually know the details of those descriptions. Playing devils advocate it sounded to me like they were trying to run a very ethical, environmentally friendly, health-focused business from the start, which is expensive as far as I can tell in the US, so maybe those prices made sense.)
- powera 4y ago
  The point is that a "unit" could not possibly have been a $16 bag of coffee, if they were getting paid $41 per unit. The story smells fake to me. The most charitable interpretation is that they were misled by their "food broker" more than they realize even now.
  - chasd00 4y ago
    maybe they gave the broker their AMEX to pay not realizing the broker makes their money on commission. heh although that would be an even more inconceivable mistake than the dollar discrepancy.
- marcinzm 4y ago
  They seem to sell the bags on their website for ~$15 so they should know that someone selling them for at least 3x the price is odd.

spencerchubb 4y ago

TLDR they had a miscommunication about the units. They thought they were getting 6,000 bags of coffee, but it was 6,000 cases with 6 bags each. In school, every class that involves numbers always stresses the importance of units. This is a good real-life example of how important units are, but easy to stumble on.

tapatio 4y ago

Direct to Consumer is the way to go. The silver lining here is that you guys got massive exposure with this fiasco and hopefully won't have to partner with (multi)national corps to sell coffee in the future.

astrange 4y ago

The coffee supply chain seems to have a lot of people claiming to add value who don’t really. Does this business need to be saved because the customer really cares they specifically roasted and bagged some beans they got? No, the coffee bush did all the work. And yet we never meet or thank it. (The farm workers go second. The James Harrison video you learned your coffee making technique from is third.)

WesternWind 4y ago

They still have incredibly priced decaf if you want it.

annoyingnoob 4y ago

I'm wondering if firing the broker is what nuked the deal. The broker told his contact to walk away and offered something else, no doubt.

ChuckMcM 4y ago

Ouch. As others have pointed out, there were a number of missteps that compounded the problem but it is a nice after action report and ideally these guys have learned three things: 1) There is no such thing as asking too many questions. 2) Legal advice is expensive, getting into a bad contract more so, as a result make sure that you understand exactly what the contract says, and what "bad things" it is protecting you and them from. 3) Distributors don't make "big orders", their customers do. If a distributor tells you they have a big order then talk directly to the customer making the order about it. If the distributor won't tell you the customer then don't do the deal. It looks like they survived this semester in "advanced logistics" and that will make them a much better company overall by incorporating that learning into their processes. One of the interesting things about being at Sun from "startup" to "enterprise company" was seeing first hand the stupid mistakes that didn't kill them but they successfully learned from. I am convinced this is part of the "business experience" for everyone but couldn't prove that from my own experience (I might just pick companies to join that learn things by pain :-)

jeromenerf 4y ago

Hmm. Between Finagle and Hanson, I chose Hanlon. It would have been a shame for this coffee to go stale. Oh, “roasted in July”, so Finagle then.

lostlogin 4y ago
That was my thought too. That’s some very old coffee - after 2-3 weeks in stale by my taste.

LaserToy 4y ago

Uff, was able to get decaf and hopefully make a new year a bit more tolerable! Happy New Years!

charlie0 4y ago

No one has pointed this out. These guys are selling high end coffee. They also admitted this was their largest order by far. Where are they getting this high end coffee from? Is there an unlimited supply of this coffee somewhere? The cynic in me suspects some of that coffee might not even be what's advertised.

Ekaros 4y ago
Is the product so unique after all if their own supplier can match to over doubling their demand. In probably rather short time frame...
Niksko 4y ago
There's high end and then there's high end. I don't know this roaster well, but I can take a stab at how this works, based on roasters local to me. The absolute biggest and best roasters have relationships and locked-in supply or exclusivity with farmers. They're also likely re-investing profits in those farmers. There are a very small number of roasters of this scale and sophistication, and they're probably already the ones in national retailers. Everyone else is buying high quality but still commodity green coffee and roasting it. The first group is able to get higher quality and guaranteed supply because of the deep relationships. They're excellent roasters, but they also are able to attain a higher level of quality because of the garbage in garbage out principle. Everyone else is competing on who can do the best job of roasting the same product. Important, but not quite the same. I can't say that this company falls into the second category for sure. But if they do, that explains how they can get lots more supply very quickly. Their coffee is high end, they're doing a good job of roasting it, but it's not so high end that there isn't a bunch more green supply that they can get.

dcj4 4y ago

Coffee must be fresh to taste good, months old coffee is rubbish.

MagicMoonlight 4y ago

Lmao you guys just got grifted into buying 30k bags of coffee from these guys

dwightgunning 4y ago

> This coffee is still good. It was roasted in June and July 2022 with a one year best buy date. Still good but hardly fresh for a specialty. Anyway. There’s a 6x number in here that somebody (or somebodies) completely missed… Seems like what they thought was a fair-to-good deal was actually a such a terrible deal that, given their incorrect definition of a unit, the numbers in their model lined up. That might be something the consultant could have spotted, since they’d seen the numbers around previous deals. I’m not sure it’s their duty/obligation to.

HiroshiSan 4y ago
> Still good but hardly fresh for a specialty. Was going to say this, I work at a specialty coffee shop and anything over 2-3 weeks is unusable.

epicureanideal 4y ago

Anyone know a good resource (book, video, whatever) about starting a small business, including approximate customer or revenue growth rates and mechanisms to get customers? So much I’ve been reading is for high growth startups and I wonder what the other end of the growth distribution is supposed to look like. How to know a slightly profitable hobby from a growing small business, for example?

SnowHill9902 4y ago

This is why you abolish the word “unit” in your factory. “Unit” has no actual meaning. It’s just a filler word for an object that you should be mentioning explicitly.

the_cat_kittles 4y ago

i neither trust nor have sympathy for anyone in the situation. i guess its because any inter-business negotiation / transaction should be assumed to be hostile since its generally close to a zero sum game, or partially one. you are trying to buy some goods / services to then sell for a profit, or you are trying to sell some goods or services for a profit that you already made. its the same as flipping something at a yard sale- sometimes you get screwed, and its basically always your fault. i guess your post reads like you think you are a well behaved consumer buying stuff at a retailer with good customer service. which is an impossibly naive or deliberately false point of view. and of course, the fact that your whole goal of writing these posts was to sell the coffee, and it worked, makes your aw shucks routine all the more suspicious. i have been screwed many times in the world of manufacturing, no one ever complains like this, you either have recourse or you eat it and dont feel bad for yourself. edit: on top of that you are selling coffee, something that is already well provided everywhere. it would be different if there was some element of charity or necessity, but your endeavor is purely a profit seeking one (with no negative externalities, id consider it neutral to everyone else) which furthers the mismatch between your tone and reality edit 2: of course i think its a dick move by someone to order a bunch, then reneg. but if you werent aware of that risk, you are just stupid, especially if your going to spend 250k

boplicity 4y ago

Classic copywriting. No wonder they sold it all out. People love a good story, and a "reason why" they can get a good deal. Amazing to see so many people engaging deeply with the story, and not even notice how incredibly effective the sales pitch is.

vivegi 4y ago

Unit of Measure confusion across varied supply chains is a real problem. Here is an anecdote from past experience. This is from the healthcare sector. Our client builds and installs systems for supply chain management in hospitals in North America and Europe. Think of hospitals ordering syringes, needles, gloves, implants etc., There are a zillion suppliers providing tons of SKUs and products will have multiple vendors supplying them (for supply risk management). Each product from a supplier also has multiple variants -- for eg: gloves could be in sizes Medium and Large etc., At the point of ordering (eg: the nurses' station) the hospital would have setup a mapping of the logical product SKU (eg: Medium Nitrile gloves) to two or three product item codes specific to each vendor. The hospital's material management system takes care of the local inventory management and reordering. While most of the ordering happens through electronic systems, there are still orders originating through <gasp>faxes</gasp>! It is a small fraction of the total orders placed, but it is non-zero and fulfilling them is critical. Many times, the nurses maintain thick binders full of product catalog listings and ordering procedures specific to the hospital's preferred/certified vendors. Most of the time, the exception process is to hand fill a form and fax the order to the vendor designated fax number. (Yes, it still happens in 2022/23). In the backend, the faxed order has to be entered (ie., entered into the supplier's ERP system). Our company was doing the order entry for these faxed orders. Once we received an order from a hospital in a small European country. The order was for "baby blankets" or something similar that is used in a Neonatal ICU. Long story short, due to a two character error in translating the unit of measure from "EA" (i.e., Each = single unit) the hospital's unloading dock received two truck full of cases of baby blankets, enough to exceed the total annual birth-rate of that small European country. True story.

xiaosun 4y ago

>>To make this order happen, we had to take $45,000 in personal loans from friends and family, $65,000 in business credit card debt, $35,000 from a business loan, $60,000 in personal credit card debt, $20,000 in outstanding invoice debt, and $11,000 in loans from us personally to the business, for a total of $216,000 in debt. I don't find myself very sympathetic. Feels like there is plenty of evidence that the business owners here aren't the most diligent or detailed oriented. $45k+$65k+$35k+$60k+$20k+$11k adds up to $236k Best case this is the result of their own naivety/incompetence, worse case this is just a distasteful marketing ploy. >>Mid July, after 6 weeks of roasting 21 hours a day on the roaster in 3 shifts, working 12-16 hour days, regularly working until 11 pm to finish bagging and boxing. Despite this work schedule, had no problem releasing their weekly hour-long podcasts every week in June/July.

xiaosun 4y ago
https://www.nobadreviewspodcast.com/episodes/ https://www.nobadreviewspodcast.com/episodes/ Podcast website
flutas 4y ago
> I don't find myself very sympathetic. Feels like there is plenty of evidence that the business owners here aren't the most diligent or detailed oriented. > $45k+$65k+$35k+$60k+$20k+$11k adds up to $236k $20k of that, as called out by them is invoice debt. Aka they will are owed that amount but amount, they just have yet to get it from the distributor. Leaving them with the $216k number given. > $20,000 in outstanding invoice debt
- xiaosun 4y ago
  So why include this figure and call it a "total of $216,000 in debt" that excludes the $20k? It's either intentionally misleading or lack of diligence in presenting the numbers.

scabros 4y ago

I got tired of reading "expert" opinions in this thread... All throwing numbers that "don't add up", but at the same time confusing some elements of the story to make it sound as "fake". Sometimes, there are just hard workers seeing an opportunity to grow after years of waiting and fighting. You see the deal, it sounds risky but you think you can do it and maybe it can change your life... You trust the wrong person, don't do your double checking, and boom, it just explodes in your face. Maybe that would never happen to this "experts", but it could definitely happen to me.

silexia 4y ago

It is super important to name the actual parties here. Who is the food broker? Who is the distributor? Otherwise, bad behaviors continue.