381–386 of 386 posts
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:// and 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 differ…
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> but wanted to adjust the terms in the non-compete section of their contract (something you hear suggested a lot by people here on HN). You probably hear this a lot on HN because: - In the US, programmer contracts are often negotiable, within reasonable limits. - Default programmer contracts are often shockingly bad for the employee. And no competent lawyer would ever advise you to sign some of the ones I've seen. I…
I had several f'ed up contracts in the 90s-2000s, and tried to negotiate each of them. In a fairly good position several times, as they had forgotten to have me sign the specific contract (non-compete, outside of CA) when they hired me. I got fuck all, as well. In 2 of 3 cases I think it was the VC who set the contract terms - I assume it was easier to lose 10% of their engineering team than to renegotiate, and I was…
That makes negotiation harder.
There a number of books from the Harvard Negotiation Project which offer roughly the following advice:
- Make sure your plan B is good enough that walking is no big deal.
- Focus on finding a fair solution, even if you need to keep pulling the discussion back to that ideal.
Basically, 75% of your negotiation effort should be spent improving your plan B.
You want to be mostly saying things like, "I would love to work for you, but a 5 year world-wide, industry-wide non-compete is simply not fair. I knew a guy who basically got locked into indentured servitude when a private equity firm abused a similar clause. I'll tell you what. You have employees in California, right? California law strikes a pretty fair balance on this issue. What contract language do you use there?"
And if they say, "No, I don't think we can do that," you say, "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that! I was looking forward to solving your challenges with _____, but it sounds like we can't find mutually agreeable terms. No harm, no foul. I wish you the best of luck." Then you walk out the door and make the phone call to move ahead with plan B or C.
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Others have pointed this out, but it's possible that the estimated volume was quoted in units while the price was quoted in bags. That seems unlikely, but it's possible. If that is what happened, then their IQ (idiocy quotient) is not quite so far off the scale as it would have been if they really had agreed to the deal without knowing the price at all. But it's still pretty damn high. And under no conceivable scenar…
But even then the price wouldn’t make sense right? I mean - regardless of unit confusion, didn’t they have to at some point calculate a price per unit themselves ? At that point the error would be pretty clear no? I can’t think of a combination of unit confusion that results in a normal price
Yes, it would, if the price was quoted per bag rather than per unit/case. That seems unlikely, but it's possible, and it would make the initial confusion slightly more understandable.
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." 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 bus…
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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.
I think a good place to start is through the service design lens — “This is Service Design Thinking/Doing,” Jon Kolko’s books, and IDEO’s handbook (all available on Amazon). These are all practical, business-oriented works, and will give you the language and tools you need to interact with service designers or conduct your own explorations. In the tech side, I still think there’s a lot of value in reading through Boo…
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I primarily do direct mail which is tangible. But the margins are thin and postage is such a big part of our cost that if a customer was going to skip payment we’d need 10 new orders to cover the loss. So it makes sense to never extend credit. I do think it’s very industry specific and food / retail as one of the worst.
What is direct mail? If that's rhe equivalent of UPS/USPS, then that's a service, not a tangible good. A tangible good would be something more like a part used in a manufacturing process, which is where the commonality to food comes into play - food tends to have many ingredients that come together into a final product - but anything following this tangible good line, from my experience, will follow these terms. The…