The Blame Game

As an addendum to Tom Karst's remarks...

...at this point I don't particularly care what agency was incompetent when, who caused this whole fiasco and where we go from here. You know that the politicians, the lobbyists and the Federales would rather drink battery acid then point a finger at a fellow government agency, for fear that somewhere down the line, they might be in the crosshairs.

Here's the deal. We bought & sold multiple loads of tomatoes under an implied 'warranty of merchantability'. Then, after arrival at destination, an agency representing the health of the United States of America comes out and states that said product is 'unfit for human consumption'. Sure, the government could argue the difference between an advisory and a recall. Semantics, I say, and frankly the chances of a dumbed-down American public picking up on that is nil. Heck, last Thursday, Chicago news media began trumpeting on the morning shows that the FDA had pinpointed a 'cluster of illnesses' that came from a popular North Side restaurant. Wanna know what the public heard? That cluster tomatoes are bad now!

That, my friends, is what we're dealing with now.

But I digress. The Florida mature green tomato market was $16.00 FOB on 5x6lgr tomatoes when the you-know-what hit the fan. I assume that most growers are & will be sympathetic to every link in the chain here when putting all this behind us. But sadly, a couple of the shippers are posturing as to holding the distributors' and repackers' financial feet to the fire when settling up on perishable product that lain stagnant for over a week, getting redder & decaying. Not our problem, they say. You bought 'em, you had 'em in your house.

Kinda wish they'd concentrate their energies on getting product moving again via promotion rather than inevitably doing the opposite.

Later,

Jay