The first email I got, I figured was spam. It was back in January and it said I had an overdue bill. But there was no link to give bank account info, just an invoice with a bunch of ID numbers, descriptions of kinds of incense, and shipping dates.
In February I got a scan of a rail shipping document. In April I got a sternly worded if unproffesionally spelled warning to “In future pls dispatch the material in different invoices and different vehicles for ur order” and a reminder of our outstanding invoice from January.
Then the bombshell. Last week, they emailed me that because of rising diesel costs, they need to raise my rail shipping costs. Now I’m expected to pay “Bangalore to Kolkata : Rs. 45000/- per Std 18 ft LPT on door to door basis.” Well that’s just an outrage. My imaginary company can’t handle that kind of an increase, we’re still late paying our January invoice! Up until now I had assumed the invisible hand of the market would deal with my imaginary company, but it just hasn’t work out that way.
What do I do? I don’t want to declare imaginary bankruptcy! I’m so bad at business, I don’t know how to handle a situation like this.
Well, Alex, they’re asking about $700 to ship an 18-ft container 1,167 miles. That’s $0.59 per mile, which is pretty steep.
On the other hand, incense has an extremely high cost-to-weight ratio. An 18-ft container is a huge amount of incense, which is normally sold at retail by the ounce. Amortizing this increase across all the retail packages you’ll get from one bulk shipment makes this increase negligible.
If you were selling something big and light, the cost of transportation would be very important for you to monitor. Since you’re selling incense, you’re free to accept this increase magnanimously – but feel free to pressure them for faster routing, or reduced late fees for your January invoice, in return.
You, uh, misspelled “unprofessionally.” In a sentence about misspellings.
I think you offer to pay them ten times the rate requested if they guarantee to run the trains twice as fast, AND they have to throw in one of those engineer hats and a train whistle.
You also want to know how much it would cost for an all-rail route from Bangalore to your other factory in Sri Lanka.
Whatever reply they make, you reply you are “incensed” that they would say something so outrageous to someone of your stature.
1) get an LLC
2) make sure you are not being shipped Viagra or terrorists
3)?
4) PROFIT!