Re:Don't donate canned goods to food banks (2017)
by hinkley on Monday July 15, 2019 @08:05PM
(#20446439)
In high school I was part of a club that was, in retrospect, very well run. And yet some things were a new adventure every time.
For their annual events they would go around trying to get local businesses to donate goods or at least sell us supplies at wholesale prices. In some cases they could write it off. And we'd do the same thing every year, starting with places we had previous success with, but often with different people on both ends of the transaction. It was a crap shoot, and every year the game plan was a little different depending on what we got and how much.
Now if I were much bigger, and I needed 100,000 cans of something, and I wanted that to be reliable so people don't starve, I skip the locals and I go to the manufacturer. Now my alternatives are 'free or 75% off' instead of 'free, 10% (employee discount) or 50% off'.
I could end up saving $20,000 a year just on peas. You going to begrudge someone drawing a salary looking for deals and relationships like that? Logistics is hard. Everyone discounts just how hard, but Software Developers are exceptionally bad actors about this.
Reminds me of a story I read about Microsoft millionaires starting their own companies and totally screwing the pooch on logistics because the MS logistics machine worked so well that it was invisible. Out of sight, out of mind. Offices don't magically appear for new employees. Neither do desks or machines or ethernet jacks. All that shit is some support person dotting a lot of i's and crossing an exhaustive (and exhausting) number of t's.
For their annual events they would go around trying to get local businesses to donate goods or at least sell us supplies at wholesale prices. In some cases they could write it off. And we'd do the same thing every year, starting with places we had previous success with, but often with different people on both ends of the transaction. It was a crap shoot, and every year the game plan was a little different depending on what we got and how much.
Now if I were much bigger, and I needed 100,000 cans of something, and I wanted that to be reliable so people don't starve, I skip the locals and I go to the manufacturer. Now my alternatives are 'free or 75% off' instead of 'free, 10% (employee discount) or 50% off'.
I could end up saving $20,000 a year just on peas. You going to begrudge someone drawing a salary looking for deals and relationships like that? Logistics is hard. Everyone discounts just how hard, but Software Developers are exceptionally bad actors about this.
Reminds me of a story I read about Microsoft millionaires starting their own companies and totally screwing the pooch on logistics because the MS logistics machine worked so well that it was invisible. Out of sight, out of mind. Offices don't magically appear for new employees. Neither do desks or machines or ethernet jacks. All that shit is some support person dotting a lot of i's and crossing an exhaustive (and exhausting) number of t's.