A few posts ago I wrote about buying chemicals from Asia. I mentioned the weakness with shipping. But there are other snags in the system to contend with.  Recently I received a parcel of non-hazardous material that I bought from China. I have been trying to source this stuff for years and I finally found a candidate vendor. We already make the stuff, but we’re short on capacity.  The qual sample was a white granular product and was packed in thin plastic zip-lock sandwich baggies jammed into a used stereo speaker box (!!@#*!). Hell, the foam part for protecting the speaker was still in the box. OK, not smart. And it was mislabeled as some other product. That was the really dumb part.

Torqued about this, I fired off a grim and terse torpedo-gram expressing my shock and dismay at their poor judgement in these matters.  The vendor rapidly replied, exclaiming in much poorer English this time, that since it was a colorless solid product, they believed there would be “problems” shipping it to the USA.  Well, let’s see … hmmm.  It is TSCA listed, it is non-hazardous, no conceivable abuse issues, it is a salt so it won’t burn, but if you dropped a 200 kg drum of it on a cockroach, the cockroach might die.  Yeah, they thought it would be suspected as an illegal substance so they would be clever and ship it under another name. But it is ACS grade material completely innocent of any conceivable abuse potential.  So by being “clever” about it, they revealed their facility with underhandedness.  How can I go forward with a vendor willing to do this crap?

So, you might be tempted to think “Golly, they’re some pretty dishonest chaps”. Well, I’m not sure yet. They may be redeemable. Thank Howard, I myself have been given many second chances. It’s a karma thing. So we’ll inch along and see how they do on the next round. I suspect they’re just naieve in these matters.  Never attribute to malice what you can first explain by ignorance.

Moral of the story- just be honest and above board in all of your business dealings. Ya can’t fall off the floor.

Update:  It was suggested that this is actually a ploy by the exporter to get around import duties.  Well, I’ll happily pay the duties rather than monkey with this sort of thing. Crimony.