Legal Concerns Archives - Page 4 of 4

I’m irritated but I’m not sure if it’s justified

May 18, 2007 Filed Under: Business Musings

I’m irritated.

I’m not sure if it’s justified though. My husband says it’s 40% justified. My staff say it’s 100% justified. Either way, justified or not, I’m irritated and spending entirely too much time on a $160 problem.

We faxed a Purchase Order to a vendor and requested “Fed Ex” shipping. Previous orders from the vendor had all shipped Fed Ex Ground.

The next day, we had our 25 kilos of very low grade clay at our warehouse in Bellingham. We were surprised to see that the vendor had overnighted 54 pounds of product from New Jersey. Ouch! That’s an expensive shipping charge!

So, we wrote them a little heads up and expected a friendly mea culpa back with a discount on shipping. Instead, the vendor refused to take any responsibility for the overnight shipping mistake, stating that we should have specifically asked for “Ground.”

I’m not sure if they’ve missed the press releases but Fed Ex isn’t just an overnight service company. Fed Ex ships five different ways. 95% of the packages Bramble Berry ships go out Fed Ex Ground. And, previous orders from the vendor shipped Ground. Why would the vendor assume that Fed Ex meant Overnight and not that it meant Ground?

Additionally, good customer service would have been phoning for clarification before the $200 shipping bill was tacked onto a $645 order.

So, I wrote back and explained our position about the prior shipping history and Fed Ex not being synonymous with overnight shipping and questioning the common sense of overnighting 54 pounds of product. I politely suggested that we split the difference in shipping so that Bramble Berry paid for part of it and they paid for part of it.

This is the note I got back from the CEO of the company.

I am sorry that you are not pleased.

I have attached a copy of the PO that we received. It does not designate ground shipping anywhere.

Please be specific with shipping instructions on any future orders.

I am not loving this response. But, I’m not entirely sure that I’m justified in being irritated or upset about it. I know what Bramble Berry would have done. I also know that I don’t like doing business with companies that I don’t feel share our values system. I also feel strongly that the CEO of the company was too terse with her response.

I’m in the process of crafting my reply. I’ve done the first draft and now I’m sitting on it for a few hours to make sure that I am entirely professional and clear headed when I finally hit that “Send” button.

Either way, you can be sure that we will “be specific with shipping instructions” on future orders to other companies.

The vendor in question has sadly lost our business.

On that lawyer bill…

April 24, 2007 Filed Under: Personal Ramblings

We very politely and calmly asked for the $800 bill to be checked over by our lawyer. We also asked that the bill be reduced to $500 at the most. Low and behold, the lawyer wrote back and said “Oh yes, I don’t really check bills before they get sent and it looks like there was a rounding error! $500 sounds fine!”

Phew. That very much makes me feel better. $500 is steep but it’s at least in the ballpark range of what the price should have been.

It’s an example of the “Just Ask” rule that Jack Canfield espouses in his book, “The Success Principles.”

$800 lawyer bill

April 21, 2007 Filed Under: Personal Ramblings

It’s like a bad joke except the punchline is me. The bill is mine. And, all for one measly paragraph. No really, just one paragraph.

My partner and I had Lawyer A draft a legal document. It was several pages long and cost $250. In order to really make the document stand on its own in court (should it ever get to that), we needed to both have separate attorneys review the document and okay it. It sounds simple on the face of things. Apparently, according to the bill that we received today, it’s not. It’s $800-not-simple. Reviewer Lawyer added one measly three line paragraph to help clarify a point and proceeded to charge $800 total for that one paragraph.

I feel cheated, taken advantage of and gypped. $250 to draw up the entire document and then $800 to review and clarify one teensy point.

I also feel like I got into the wrong business. Soap doesn’t quite seem as lucrative as being a lawyer. When my lawyer is making more than my Doctor, something is wrong with the system.

You trademarked WHAT?!

March 26, 2007 Filed Under: Personal Ramblings

It seems like if you have enough money, time and high powered attorneys that you can get anything trademarked. Speaking from experience, I tried for five or six years to get Bramble Berry trademarked (and finally got put on the supplemental registry!) but it took serious effort, time and money. If Pfizer can trade mark “Thank you very much,” I don’t see why the Trademark office gave me such grief over trying to trade mark “Bramble Berry.”

Trademarked phrases:

Thank you very much. Pfizer.

Yes. Book-of-the-month club

Thank you! THank you! Little Casars

Very Funny. TBS

What’s your number? Express

And service marked:

ThankYou. Citigroup.

Scammers

March 21, 2007 Filed Under: Business Musings

I came across this thread on the SoapDish Forum today. It should be required reading for all new soapmakers and business people.

We have aggressive SPAM filters at work but still Bramble Berry gets thirty to ninety emails a day that want to buy our product (without knowing what our product is), give us money (normally from a deposed dictator that obtained said-money fraudulently), or just want us to invest in some new company (which will be hitting it big “any day now!”). It’s irritating from a normal “Ugh, and I waste my time on this?!” standpoint, baffles me from a “And yet people believe this myth be true enough times to make it worth the scammer’s while” perspective and infuriates me from a “And I pay someone to sift through these emails?!” view.

Supposedly filtering SPAM costs $874 per employee per year. I’m not surprised. So, that means that I spend $21,850 (give or take a few hundred dollars) per year because some industrious spammer bought a program to send out Viagra emails to 30,000 people per hour and .0001% of those people end up buying the Viagra, thus making it worth said spammers money.

I love this quote from the article referenced above:

“If one of out of every 72 of your employees showed up to work and slept all day, you’d be upset about that, but you’re losing that productivity simply because you have spam coming through.”

But I digress. Head over to the ‘Dish and read the thread about one small soaper’s dilemma on whether to treat a phishing-type email as a legitimate business inquiry. It certainly gave me food for thought.

Introducing the soon-to-be-mayor

March 6, 2007 Filed Under: Personal Ramblings

This weekend, I had the great privilege and pleasure to introduce the man that I believe will be Mayor of Bellingham in 2008, Dan McShane. The party was at the newly built Farmer’s Market permanent home . About 200 people attended which the campaign was thrilled about, given that the primaries are a full 6 months away!

I was honored to be asked to introduce soon-to-be Mayor McShane. I think they asked me because of my activism in the community as well as my ties to downtown through our retail store Otion. Plus (blushing, eyes cast downward with modesty), I’m a pretty good public speaker (not naturally – it’s a learned trait from attending a public speaking school – more on that in another blog post later). I also loved meeting people I wouldn’t otherwise have an opportunity the interact with. Listening to the energy that was put into talking about how we can make Bellingham a better place was inspiring. I literally left with a buzz, a high of positive energy.

It was a great event and I felt so blessed to be a part of it. I’m also incredibly confident that Dan McShane is the right person to lead Bellingham to an even better place in the future.