Another off-the network e-mail

More interesting yet puzzling developements at the office-

We have a rather large customer that purchases regularly 10 items from us. We were recently underbid by a different company for 3 of those items, these items earned us more than 100k in the last half of last year alone. The remaining items only earn us roughly 10k to 15k per quarter. So we still are earning 40k to 60k a year from their sales alone.  But when they told us that we had lost the bid for those 3 items someone in our (much smaller) sales department increased the cost of the remaining 7 items by 15 to 20%???!

I realize I am not one of our salesman, i don't even talk to purchasing agents on a regular basis, and yes it makes sense to try recoop some of the business we are no longer getting by adjusting our prices, but.....

Who the hell is running this?  All previous theories aside, does this help us increase our profits?  This doesn't even sound like they're trying to whittle us down to make us a division of another company because they're purposely alienating large purchase customers.  This isn't the first one either, someone else in my department had heard from a very disturbed customer whose pricing had gone up a significant percent between orders- with no discussion at all, only he was returning all of it and never speaking to our company again.

I just don't get it.

---

Try the new Beta version of MSN Messenger - it's FREE!