quote:

Originally posted by Aglifter:
And I’m playing dumb, asking them what they mean.

(For the record, I do not sell people from ethnic minorities, or of any other extraction.)

Why play dumb? Some purchasers have to check boxes (whether they agree with that or not), and getting cute with your potential customers will irritate them.

Are you in business or in the political-point-making business?

quote:

Originally posted by Aglifter:
So, welcome to the joys of the school lunch program - one of the more crooked things in government.

No one can donate more than $1000 of food, per year, to a school. So, the charity donates the money to the school, with the earmark that it be used to buy ice cream from us, since the founder of the charity “won’t serve anything of lower quality than she would serve her own family.”

(The charity is a really nice group, run by lovely people. I have employees who remember the charity, warmly, many years later, from their elementary school days)

Bureaucracy at its finest. Good on you and the charity though for trying to make it work.

quote:

Originally posted by jhe888:
Why play dumb?

He explained that in his second post.

quote:

Some purchasers have to check boxes (whether they agree with that or not), and getting cute with your potential customers will irritate them.

Aglifter appears to be running a successful business. Do you think he needs to be told how to interact with customers and potential customers? It seems to me that he knows what he's doing, and from what I know of him, he seems to have a good head on his shoulders. I have faith in him.

quote:

Originally posted by Aglifter:
She’s a secretary for a principle at a school which is not part of the program.

Interesting, perhaps she was told to check out the program by her boss, they may want to implement at their school and work with the charity.

Who knows someone at the school you are working with might have told her or her boss about it.

Not every inquiry is nefarious, sometimes all the things we read and talk about can influence all the crazy ideas on the who and why.

quote:

Originally posted by Sig2340:

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
Do you mind if I ask just who is asking you such a thing?

All fed.gov procurements have requirements for participation by:
- Woman owned
- Minority owned
- Disabled
- Service disabled
- HUBzone
- Ability One (in their new name I can’t recall)
and other businesses.

In addition there are set-aside, often no-bid contracts for those groups.

In the old days the guy would come with the Grainger catalog, you'd show him what you wanted and he'd order it and tack on his percentage. Now days these vendors have website that are basically clones of people like Grainger, and it works the same way. Your tax dollars at waste.

You guys who deal with this nonsense- do you have a natural immunity to bullshit, or did you develop a tolerance for it a bit at a time, like old Mithridates?

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
You guys who deal with this nonsense- do you have a natural immunity to bullshit, or did you develop a tolerance for it a bit at a time, like old Mithridates?

Makes me glad our upper mgmt is a bunch of 'good ol boys' who have barely over 0 tolerance for all this stuff, personally & don't appear to have much of it in our business, professionally.

Most of the dotMIL contracts for me were not 8(a). Rarely ever sub-contracted due to loss of control. We could hunt and kill most of our own dinners.

But you could see it everywhere. Air Force colonel with Hispanic wife (8A company president/CEO), son is USAF too. Sold something they have no way of delivering other than to hire a sub; me and Bolivian-bruddah show up and get it done.

Hell, working for almost any public sector agency/government entity is mind-numbingly challenging for me. Success is not measured in a way that normal people would understand it.

The problem is ($$$$$$$) that half of our economy now comes from the government. Business sucks at it’s teat following their goober rules.

I much prefer commercial/private sector clients all day long. There is a good possibility of seeing the results of your work be efficacious and appreciated.

If your client takes govt money they will ask you all kind of questions about diversity, human trafficking, sustainability practices. Universities and non-profits are the worst. Publicly traded companies aren't much better when trying to paint a picture of wokeness.