In the late 90's, my dad was a screen printer and did a bunch of big runs of garments for Walmart stores. He'd built a good size business, doing regular jobs fo

In the late 90's, my dad was a screen printer and did a bunch of big runs of garments for Walmart stores. He'd built a good size business, doing regular jobs for Disney, action sports, NFL, etc, building a shop that usually ran two shifts of hundreds of employees. It's not an exaggeration to suggest that if it had a screen printed image on it, we probably printed it. > very exacting in pick up and delivery times Well, for us, not exactly. For our last contract with Walmart, there was a lot of language about timing. If the driver arrived and the order wasn't ready for pickup, we'd be penalized for every hour of delay. The penalties were such that you could end up losing crazy money on the job if you weren't confident about your abilities to deliver on time. Not a big deal for us since we were tight, and could easily handle it. Then Walmart arrived a day early. The driver had made a choice to stop for us first, which, after pulling up the contract, we realized it allowed for that. Our lawyer had determined it was vague enough that the agreed delivery date would prevail, contractually. Which is probably why we didn't notice that the contract also said the pickup clock started the minute the driver arrived, and that was also the official pick up time. Had we caught that during contract negotiations, we'd have refused the terms. But we missed it. We weren't a small shop. We already ran two shifts, and quickly needed to pull in a third to be able to finish in time to get any profit out of the job. We almost did that last contract with zero profit, and refused all business from Walmart after that day. Thing is, I've heard of similar stories where Walmart would do similar tricks with produce from farms. Whether myth or not, I don't know, but I know with certainty how they treated us. There were probably incentive structures in place for drivers to show up early, and some of them had the balls to do it a lot earlier than others. In this case, they could give the driver an bonus for his better than on-time averages, then "buy" goods worth a retail $5M+ for the cost of the driver's salary and bonus, plus whatever the supplier (us) managed to keep after penalties.