Privilege On Edge

I am continually amazed at how on-edge people are right now. And in some cases with good reason. The pandemic is raging in some places and not others, those places where it does not rage still require a certain amount of vigilance. It all makes sense. Except for the levels of awful behavior among some of the most privileged of us whose basic routines haven’t been interrupted for the most part and our biggest daily challenge is just having products to sell at work.

I swear the pacific northwest field reps for my company were trying to get fired today.

One of the first-world problems associated with my work is when our customer isn’t really a customer at all. They’re a middle man. They have a website with some stuff on it…a lot of stuff on it…and from time to time someone orders something from them but they don’t have it on their shelf. Then they send us a purchase order and have us send the product to an address in some other place and they just collect the money. It’s fine until it doesn’t work.

“How was I supposed to know this purchase order was sent, if I didn’t know you sent it because I didn’t get it?” “I understand that, but…” he replies back. Then order entry gets beaten up because there is a nexus (resulting in a sales tax charge for not having a PA resale certificate) thing and then someone in accounting gets beaten up about that and then the CFO of the company who signs ALL of our paychecks gets thrown into the jet intake over a procedure which was put into place after the company had to pay back taxes (10 years worth!) to California after an audit in 2009.

Field sales representatives for product manufacturers are becoming more obsolete than CD players.

This particular customer does not care about doing business with my company. They buy something every so often and my guess is their ire is from clerking an order from a 3rd party platform (like Amazon, for example) where time is of the essence, and these people who don’t care in the first place get bent out of shape because they look bad. In reality they’re deceiving prospective customers by making it look like they have something in stock when they don’t.

Field reps get 8% of gross sales. This customer has done $2600 in 6 months. It’s a lot of wasted energy over a customer that makes you $208 before any taxes as a 1099. The other part of the equation is that what they ordered had actually been on backorder between when the order was sent and not received up to now — 12 days. But that didn’t matter, either! Someone else was going to burn for this!

It’s still very important to understand who you are giving your money to when you buy something.

When you buy something online there is a great deal of deception to either “game” an algorithm, game a vendor (with an alias) to circumvent minimum-advertised-price stipulations, or game customers into thinking you have something when you don’t. In the professional audio industry it’s the wild west, and these e-commerce people are squeezing manufacturers because they’re giving that margin away to 3rd party platforms like Amazon and eBay. It’s not a sustainable business model but these companies get sucked into it. It’s an absolute dance with the devil, and my company is actively working to avoid these situations by having fewer and fewer “dealers” of our products like this example, who don’t care in the first place.

In the big picture it’s just very clear to me that even the most privileged of people are suffering through their own misery by being this angry about unimportant things: a customer who lies to the public, field reps who can’t say, “Well, we’ll pick up the tab on the freight because we didn’t follow up” instead of making the product supplier eat it and then saying it’s our fault. We need to get over ourselves or pound sand.