At a gift show last year I found a Toronto supplier for a new merchandise item. I made a first tentative order of 10 items and, when it arrived, it achieved pretty good final values on eBay but, unfortunately, most of the order arrived damaged. Five of the ten items were damaged severely. The supplier said to send them back for replacement and so I did.
Time passed and the supplier claimed not to have received the item. Canada Post tracking indicated that the package had been delivered. Because of the way the supplier responded, and initially failed to respond, I was certain that he was attempting to defraud me on this return.
The total value of the 5 returned items was only about 50 bucks but what really upset me was that this man made something of a racist out of me. He belongs to a particular ethnic group that is broadly known to commit the most ICBC (Insurance Corporation of British Columbia) frauds and, subsequent to this incident; I’ve learned that this group commits wide-scale fraud everywhere. Don’t get me wrong. I believe that each individual, no matter what his origins, is valued by the quality of his character but, in talking to several members of this group I’ve learned that even they coomonly say, that one should be very careful in dealing with one of their kind.
It was evident that this fellow wanted me to claim the loss with CP. I told CP that I believed that this individual was attempting to defraud them through me and I considered contacting his local RCMP. I told my supplier so and he didn’t like this idea much.
What really bothered me, as I’ve written above, was that this individual, and those like him, are committing crimes of fraud which are apparently widespread within an identifiable ethnic community and thereby giving genuine credence to racially based bias – the only viable racism I’ve ever known of.
Here, I thought, was a battle worth fighting if only on an individual scale. How dare he besmirch his own race this way!
I related the story to a friend of mine – the best business mind that I’ve ever known. He’s a financial planner and mathematically gifted. Like me he recently read Power vs. Force and offered his advice base on his interpretation of that book.
He said that, as unusual as it may seem, the most evolved thing to do would be to set an example by forgiving my supplier.
Consequently I sent my supplier an email offering him an ‘out’. I wrote that perhaps one of his employees, having found a box of broken merchandise, had simply thrown it out. Further I wrote that, whatever the case, all is forgiven and ‘let’s put this behind us’. I ordered another 10 items requesting that special attention be paid to ensuring that none of them is defective.
Another week passed. Then he then wrote that an employee had indeed put the box of defective merchandise in an unusual place, that he’d be happy to replace them, and could I please forgive him.
Yesterday I received my replacement items and one has already sold on eBay.
