We work directly with our manufacture and know that keeping everything cleaned is a major concern. Mistakes sometimes happen, and unfortunately it’s not always caught until it gets to the end user. No manufacture is gonna be perfect. I think the good ones really try hard to be as perfect as possible. Sometimes though, sh!t happens.
Example: We had a small batch of ethanol ship direct to a customer. It was immediately found that there was a contaminate. The manufacturer shut down everything and did an investigation into the problem. It was found that an employee (newer) had not cleaned and purged a pump system out when switching chemicals. The batch was very small, so it was contained immediately. Of course our customer was very mad at us, as we were the ones that sold the product. The manufacturer stepped up and made it right with our customer and with us. Did we lose the customer? Temporarily. Have we earned that customer back? Yes we have. They came back after trying somewhere else and found that our customer service was leaps and bounds ahead of the other company and that we had only had the one problem. The other company has had more than a few.
So things happen sometimes, totally out of the control of the wholesale/retail shop. Acknowledging that mistakes happen is the first step in correcting them. Nobody is perfect, but we sure strive to be.
Other issues to admit: Shipping. Once the product is on the freight trucks, it’s very hard to do anything about problems. We had a large shipment get placed on a train by mistake and would no way make it to our customer on time. We had to ship out another entire order, on our dime, to the customer and hurry it up, which was not cheap. But we did it because that’s the right thing to do for the customer. It wasn’t their fault and they needed the product. We worked it all out with them and got them taken care of. So there are just somethings we can’t control, but we do our best to react to them and take care of the customer. I would hope that other supply companies take pride in their work as well.