Jesus that's vile. I had a small group chat on Tuesday with that same manager from this meeting, one of their marketing guys, and one of the three sales rep I am the full time assistant/backup for because his sales dropped a tiny bit but mostly because a chain store account of his that brought us a lot of business closed down. They were extremely chill and reasonable about it though, and basically just wanted to look at some of the discounts we were still giving to customers whose had been not purchasing as much as in the past.

Basically they wanted to slightly lower their admittedly pretty fat discount for how little volume they were pulling from us, and offer small increase in discounts for our bigger clients. They talked a lot about rapport building and trust too, but only in the context of being able to better serve them and their business in a more mutually beneficial way.

I'm always happy to help boost sales especially when I know my customers and what kind of stuff moves well for them and in general based on market trends. Like "hey this third party vendor product is offering us a big manufacturing discount, I can give an extra x off on this product right now if you want to bump up y product that is blowing up on tiktok right now" or like, "hey this is out of stock from this vendor and has been for a while, would you like to try this one that we manufacture on site? You will get a much better profit margin since you're buying it direct and I'll even give you half a case for half price and a free sample of your choice if you want to bring in any of our items you don't yet carry." And customers love that shit.

So yeah real mixed bag, but there is a side of the job that actually is rewarding despite being in the belly of the beast of a massive corporation.

They are also very clear about protecting their very large portion of immigrants and folks with checkered pasts from the feds and cops. Hell one of the women in my office is rad as fuck and a comrade who literally has a warrant for her arrest for some bullshit in socal and they still gave her a job knowing this, which is actually unironically pretty based for a company like this.