I just lost my largest customer to China.

uh…they are on strike because AAM won’t give them the proper documentation that AAM used to come up with all their demands for the pay of unskilled workers. Last i heard they are trying to find a fair $/hr that is actually lower than what they currently make. i heard the figures that were actually already agreed upon range from 11-18 $/hr. AAM also formally threated, a few weeks ago, to close the plant down permanently if the union didn’t get shit straightened out.

wait, I’m trying to decipher that.

You’re saying that the union is pissed because AAM won’t show them proof of why unskilled workers should be paid less?

AAM has to provide them with whatever research or documentation they have done so they can come to a fair agreement for the wages. AAM’s original offer was less than what i get paid to sit here and type this right now.

in all fairness,sitting on NYSpeed typing is pretty unskilled work. :tspry:

Truth^^
i don’t want to get into it either.

But my prof. at jewB does.

pretty much.

very true. When i worked at curtis screw i watched men get layed off to much lower positions because their parts went off-shore and they had nothing to make. The only hope that we had to keep our parts is that sometimes they would rust on their way over from china. And if the company that went offshore on us (usually ford), was to pay to have them flown here, it would cost more to have them shipped than to have us make the part and ship it to them. So sometimes we would get parts back that way. But i used to love listening to the guys there complain about the japanese and out them in the same category as china. Japan has union and the U.S. can easily compete with their production prices. Which is good for both countries economies. The chinese people will eventually wake up to this, im hoping for the sake of the U.S. auto industry it is sooner rather than later.

Update (again)…

Another one of our very large customers has been strange lately.
Early last year we received an order for 10,000 units.
By June they had 2000 units in inventory and told us to stop shipping.
(We could have forced them to take the units but that is seldom a good siuation to create)
The reason given was that their customers were buying Chinese units for less money.
When we asked in December when they would need more and they told us they needed 500 units like yesterday because they had none in stock!
WTF?
We shipped 500 A.S.A.P. and shipped 500 more after that.
Last week they said the economy was killing their industry.
Two days later they want us to keep shipping A.S.A.P.!
WTF?!?
I should also mention that we sell through distributors around the country so our communication is filtered through them, which isn’t always a good thing.
Businesses seem to be out of control these days.

Thats an odd fucking cycle…

im sure you aren’t alone… the US economy has only seen this type of upheaval e few times in the last 100 years.

its never good practice to jam a purchase commitment agreement down a customers throat. as you indicated, sometimes its necessary to take the high road. i actually came across something like this today myself.

sounds like a bad string of communication somewhere inbetween you and the buyer.

are the distributors screwing you around?

ive been dealing with teh same situation with HP… they have a large contract that i helped deal, worth abotu 4 million per year…

they had me bring in inventory, of about 8k units, we shipped half of them… then they dissapeared… i told them we had the units made FOR them so they had to act… they ordered 500 and said they were overstocked… then they all of the sudden needed 3k… yet i had shipped them back to TN becuase i needed the warehouse space… so they were pissed that they had to wait a day… when it had been 4 months since they had last ordered them

Yeah, this particular distributor is huge and the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing sometimes.
We constantly call them when we are anxious to ship inventory.
They seem to have 3 or 4 people we deal with and none of them give us the same answer ( or any useful answer).:smash2:

I mean how do you go from 2000 to 0 in no time at all?

That doesn’t sound strange to me.
Your end customer was evaluating Chinese crap.
Your distributor caught wind of it and drove down their inventory.
End customer decided Chinese crap is crap.
Distributor is caught with no stock and pants down, places hurry up order.

Everyone bitches about the squeeze to drive down their costs, doesn’t mean everyone is going under.

People are flaky, and it makes it hard to do business.

That sounds just like one of our customers!
“The lack of planning on your part does not necessarily constitute an emergency on my part.”
Oh, wait, “The customer is always right”.

Believe me that thought had crossed my mind about a second after they wanted us to stop shipping because they are always beating us up on price.

Clinton’s free trade act put it to the middle man. we the middle class will no longer b able to survive on manufacturing jobs that were once prime jobs to have. once company’s over sea actually start paying the ppl for there labor is where America will get back in the mix

AWDrifter aint exactly a middle man.

The last two posts have me confused.
I am not a middle man if you mean like a distributor.

how did my post confuse you?

Nikuk: AWDrifter aint exactly a middle man.
AWDrifter: I am not a middle man.

W T F M A T E ?