Monday, December 06, 2010

Cutting Off Your Nose to Spite Your Face

I cannot believe that one of my suppliers actually said this to me. One of my sales reps told me that his Department Manager would stop selling us a certain popular product of theirs if we bought a certain new product from another distributor. His reasoning was that when this company began focusing on this genre other distributors said it would ruin the wine/spirits business in Memphis. He said back then other distributors tried doing this very thing & pressuring stores to not purchase their new products. So now that some other distributors are getting into this genre they want to retaliate. Why on earth would a company want to punish their customers (me) & themselves (loss of sales) by refusing to sell me a product because I bought something from another company? That is the very definition of "cutting off your nose to spite your face". It made me so mad that I could barely contain myself. How mind bogglingly ignorant? That would be the same thing as if I refused to sell to a customer who purchased from another store. Stupid. Just stupid. Not to mention bad business.