Recession advice

The rumour mill about companies in trouble is at full throttle. On the one hand I have only heard good things about the banks dealings with business overdrafts and letters of credit, but there is word out there that business financing is getting difficult. And trade is undeniably slow.

One example of a potential problem is that if our importers can’t get letters of credit from their bank, their foreign suppliers will refuse to supply them and we will find that stock promised to us just doesn’t arrive.

As a company we have a policy of paying for our beds and furniture on the nail but in the current climate even this policy may not be sufficient to secure stock. Our current bed buying strategy is to buy more back up stock and be sure that we try and take orders on stock we have, rather than stock that “is on the water”.

Advice for the public? My advice is if you think for a moment that the company you are buying from may go under then always use a credit card to pay. We may complain about the extravagant charges the card companies charge retailers but one service they do provide is a guarantee that if the company goes under the customer will get their money back.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 12:34 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.