business advice handling a situation fairly/correctly

[tmatoy]

Brothers and Sisters,

Any advice on this situation would be greatly appreciated, I want to do the right thing.

I am a small business owner, one of the things I do is supply table tops for restaurants. The way I run is I purchase the bald table tops from a company and I put the finish on and sell them to the end user.

Recently I purchased 50 table tops from a large company, my first dealing with them. The total bill came out to $8000. They usually require payment in full before they ship, but they worked with me and set it up to pay 50% down and the rest 1 month later. So as of now I owe them $4000.

When buying unfinished tables, there is no warranty when it comes to problems that can arise from having unprotected wood. These tables are supposed to come to me ready to finish. After I put the finish on the first 20, I noticed that there was a very poor sanding job, also there was a negative reaction with the glue they use and my industry standard finish. The company doesn't get a negative reaction when they put their finish on because it runs through an oven and doesn't have time to react. I let them know about the poor sanding job, took pictures, and they took responsibility for this. He offered no feed back on the negative reaction of the finish. He offered me a discount on my next order for the bad sanding job.

This has cost me many man hours and extra material to complete the job, roughly $2500-$3000, more than the discount they can offer on my next order. I probably will not use this company again for future orders and they know this because of all the issues. I let them know I was ready to send final payment, but I feel I should be compensated for my time and material. The salesman that I deal with asked me how much extra time and material I put into these and said he would talk with the owners and get back to me after the weekend.

I feel I received a product that was not what I payed for. The tables cannot be sent back, because my customer needs them to open their restaurant.

When it comes to final payment, what should I do if they offer me a inappropriate discount on these tables?

Thank You,
Tony

 

[Tubalcain]

Mediation or talk to your lawyer.

 

[CuriousQDe]

I dealt with this with a printer. The job went to the printer and the publication was produced out of order, as in page 41 comes before page 9, some pages upside down. It took months and court was avoided by earnest good-will negotiation. My boss wanted to pay zero for the mess, and of course the printer wanted full payment. We met somewhere in the middle and parted company.

You need to talk to owner as he or she is the decision maker. State what you think is a fair resolution of the issue. Repeat whatever was documented about the condition of the wood as it was supposed to be shipped, document that the problem did not occur in shipping...(if possible, also find out if any other customer has had this problem and check if the company has any other pending law suits). Again, you want to be fair to both sides. If there are no claims whatsoever about the condition of the product and you received the product, how far do you want to take it? You don't want to be sued by this person and sometimes, the easier thing to do is to settle the matter and move on. I think you'll have most success if you make this a win-win situation.