Worker Shares Tale of Corporate Rigidity Resulting in Unnecessary Distress

Corporate life can be really difficult for account managers who have to deal with various kinds of clients at work. Sometimes in a strict corporate environment, rules can be a pain to follow especially when they do no good. One such situation was faced by a manager who had to comply with a contract knowing that it would wreak havoc on its client. However, since their client was a stickler for rules, their actions led to their own peril. 

Here’s What Happened

On the Reddit forum, the employee said that they worked as an account manager at a food distribution company. He wrote that one of their chain accounts had them service all of the locations in the state. That particular chain was very hard to deal with as their company was a small family-operated firm.  He explained that there were many items in their contract that weren’t followed. One such item was a Monthly Pricing Audit.

The employee said no one from their client’s company ever asked for the audits, from which the customers benefited. However, when their lead contact left the company, the client’s head honcho took over the operation. The worker wrote that this person was “NASTY” as they once had the worker drive up to all of their locations just to teach them a lesson for running out of an item once.

The worker then explained that this honcho immediately asked them to conduct the monthly audits. After dragging it out for months, they had to do it. In retaliation, the company said they would also enforce the whole contract which also had an item that said in case an item X moved less than the prescribed amount, the client would have to pay a storage fee.

It was found that 90% of the supplied products were eligible for that fee. With this, the worker said there would be a price increase of 30% per case. The company alerted the corporation saying that it would be unfair to the customers. However, the corporation pushed on executing the contract and asked the worker to refer all store complaints to the corporate rep.

Thus, the worker said there was a 10% increase in prices for the most popular products and a 30% price increase for the least moving items. “Stores are LIVID,” the user wrote in the post. However, the worker wasn’t at a loss as their company made 25% more off that corporate-led account and had to do less work as all the complaints flooded their corporate rep now.

Readers of the post mostly sided with the worker calling out the corporate foolishness of their client. One user (u/digitalnoise) recommended the worker ask their corporate client for a 5-step action plan on how they intend to be better partners in the future.

Meanwhile, some users tried to figure out what could’ve been the reason behind the actions of the corporation. One user (u/Geminii27) said that there could’ve been some power struggle between the head honcho and the stores because of which the price increase did not bother them.

The user also reasoned that there could have been some bonus incentives linked to compliance with contracts or the head honcho wanted to please someone in compliance/legal who wasn’t happy about the contracts not being followed across the board.

For more such bizzare stories, follow r/MaliciousCompliance on Reddit.