"Dude" wrote in message
...

Walmart has never signed a single $4B deal AFAIK. Period. Furthermore
I
doubt that *any* supplier has ever lost Walmart as a customer because
they could not arrive somewhere at a particular time.


You know, it doesn't really make a damn bit of difference what deals
Walmart has or has not made, nor does it matter what any other company
has or has not done. The original point was that started this whole
waste of time was the fact that sometimes the "economical" choice winds
up losing you money. This is true whether or not the original example
has ever actually been represented in real life, and it's something that
every company either knows intuitively or soon learns in sorry detail.

Furthermore, in the engineering management world, when a request for
bids says that bids must be received by such-and-such time, then they
better be there at that time. Bids that aren't received on time are
simply not considered - there are usually plenty of bidders who do get
their bids in on time, and if not, the client will probably re-start
the bidding process.

Rich Lemert


You can often get a waiver if you show good faith effort, and if you show
that it could not have been changed. For instance, if Fed Ex put it on
the
wrong truck.

Still, it doesn't help, and people who don't know how these things work
just
really have not seen the pettiness and/or bureaucratic idiocy that goe on
these days. Often, you have a big ego type who is looking to get rid of
competitors so he can choose the vendor who best kisses his arse, or some
power starved purchasing maggot who loves his/her chance to veto the will
of
the executive and sales people who all make 3 to 30 times what they make.

Funny thing is, the OP was NOT about BIDDING, but negotiating, dealing
face-to-face, selling...

In a world where most business with end-users is done by phone menus and
CSR's in India, the upper levels typically deal across the conference table.