If you have to deal with unlikeable people in business who insist on doing things the hard way, sometimes all you can do is go along with the program and give them what they want!

And that’s exactly what the person did who wrote this story on Reddit’s “Malicious Compliance” page.

Check out how they handled this situation in expert fashion!

Sure, we can follow the contract.

“I work as an Account Manager for a Food Distribution company.

I have an NDA, so I can’t disclose the type of materials or type of project, so that will be relatively vague, but the story is still good.

Okay, so we work with a chain account and service all of their locations in our state. This is a relatively small, but global chain, that is historically, VERY challenging to work with.

These folks aren’t easy to deal with.

Management is aggressive, pushy, just not nice. Our company is a tiny, family owned and operated company full of nice goofballs. We don’t take things too seriously, provide great service, and put up with way too much from them.

We’re their contracted distributor. There are a few items in the contract that no one follows and hasn’t followed for years. One of those being, Monthly Pricing Audits.

No one from their corporate had ever asked for it, but we never brought it up because our pricing is not always consistent with the ‘contracted’ price we are supposed to charge the locations.

Reason being, is we’re often able to get a product for cheaper elsewhere and also sell to our other accounts outside of this chain; so, we’re not always compliant, but it’s always for the benefit of the customer.

Well, our direct contact at the company quit, and the head honcho over there stepped in to take her place. He insisted that we begin sending Monthly Pricing Audits, per the contract.

This was ridiculous.

Mind you, this guy is just nasty. I’ve had to drive around to every location in the state to recover a product the locations use less than ~1 case a year of, because they wanted to teach us a lesson for running out of something ONE TIME.

They assign us ‘complaint forms’ that I have to go into their site and resolve the complaint. It’s usually about something stupid: ex. “you said that you were going to receive a product on this day, but you didn’t tell us if you got it yet, please write out your 5 step action plan and solution to being better partners to us.”

UGHHHH.

So anyways, we dragged out the audits for a while, but were unable to avoid it, so we brought up another item in the contract that had been neglected in attempts to be like, if you’re going to enforce this, we’re going enforce the WHOLE CONTRACT.

It stated that if we were carrying an item for this account that moved less than X number of cases a week, that we would be able to charge a ‘storage fee’ per month that it sat in our warehouse. They said, yes, we need to be following the contract 100%.

Okay!

WELL. We found that almost 90% of the products did not move X number of cases a week and were eligible for a storage fee to be added on.

The language stated that we were to also back-charge for the months that it sat in the warehouse that we did not charge storage, which meant that there were items that had a price increase of ~$30 PER CASE.

That’s RIDICULOUS. Especially for a restaurant in our state. We alerted the company and said hey…while this would be more money for us, we really don’t want to do that to our customers.

They said, it didn’t matter and we had to follow the contract and if any stores complained, I was to send them directly to their Corporate rep.

So, the updated Contract Pricing went into effect, effectively bumping up pricing on their most popular items by about 10% and the Storage Pricing by about 30% on their lowest moving items, increasing overall pricing by about 25%.

Hey, what can you do?

Stores are LIVID. It totally sucks for them and I feel super badly about it, but it’s a result of their Corporate being jerks.

The best part, is now I get these complaint things about pricing all day long and I just get to tag their corporate representatives to deal with it instead. I have less work and we make about 25% more off an account.

They wanted us to follow the contract, right?”

Check out what folks had to say about this.

One person has an idea…

Another individual shared their thoughts.

This individual thinks they know what’s really going on.

Another person has a five-point plan.

Nailed it!

Nicely played!

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.