Customer of The Year

I have one customer to whom I owe a huge debt of gratitude. I
had a broker basically stick us with 29 loads of chicken earlier
this year. It was supposed to have been sold to a large corpora-
tion whose name I will not mention in this post. He gave us his
word on it. And since my boss knew him and had worked with
him before, we bought the inventory based on that. Well... I'm
sure you can see what's coming here. He didn't really have the
deal sewn up. And when it fell through he kind of shrugged and
said, "Wow, I'm really sorry guys."

Enter the customer of the year. Since we are wholesalers, we
sell to a lot of distributors. This customer, who was actually my
very first customer when I got into this business (and he taught
me much of what I know about poultry and deli meats), pitched
in immediately to try to help me move the loads. Now under-
stand that 29 loads of chicken means 29 x 40,000 lbs. Or, in lay-
man's terms, a lot of mother fucking chicken.

So COTY has sold a few loads a month for me every month. As
the chicken market began to dive I have not made money on all
of them, but the most important thing is that I have lost MUCH
LESS than I would have without him as I would not have been
able to move many of the loads. (The company that manufactures
the product and I are in he same market so its difficult to find
customers to whom they aren't already selling, and since they are
the manufacturer they can always beat my price.)

Anyway, thanks to COTY I am down to 5 loads of that product now
and he hopes to have them moved Monday. But in addition to that,
he just called me today. On Saturday. ON SATURDAY! To let me
know that he is in the process of making a deal on the only other
load I need to move so that I can get it out of the way and not lose
money on it. What a great guy!*

*Just as a general FYI, the hurricane took the market up for a
very short time, but it is now falling and is expected to return to
something closely approximating pre-hurricane levels very soon.