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"

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.

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.

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

probably

„Can you move 6000 units?”

“Yes we can move 6000 units at 10$ per pound”

“Sounds great, get them going!”

I probably wouldn't take on tens of thousands of dollars of loans based on that. I guess it's presented that they took the loans out after the confusion was identified.

When I saw it yesterday they had more than 1,000 cases of the dark roast left (and none of the light or medium). So 1,000 cases in a day, a big chunk of the 34,000 bags. I wonder how long it will take them to ship, what with their not having the facilities for it.

"I wonder how long it will take them to ship, what with their not having the facilities for it."

The sob story for why the shipping is delayed will be in an upcoming blog post.

Stay tuned...

They were relying on a consultant.

> How can bags be mistaken for cases when negotiating a deal? The price would be different by an order of magnitude.

These kinds of confusions happen regularly, lol. Back a decade ago when I was working in pubs, colleague ordered what he thought would be one pack of paper towels - in the order form, he chose the wrong column to place the "1" in. Next day a shipping company showed up with a pallet of paper towels. Boss wasn't amused too much, but not because of the money, rather because we lacked the space to store a fucking pallet of paper towels. We ended up selling half of them to patrons at cost and managed to squeeze the rest wherever we could - I would not be surprised if someone today would still find a random roll somewhere and wonder where it came from.

In another job at a supermarket, this happened somewhat weekly. Didn't really matter unless it were really slow-moving or perishable goods, but it rarely happened in the latter case and in the former case stuff could also simply be sent back to the central warehouse.

This isn't some random small deal. It's hard to see how nobody noticed that the total dollar value of these orders was either six times higher or six times lower than expected on a invoice that represents the bulk of your entire business.