Water, water everywhere…
No good deed goes unpunished
Remember the Toy Run back in 2014? It was a hot, sunny, August day and the new food vendor at Blue Cross ran out of water and soda. We remember. UMV decided to sell bottled water at the 2015 Toy Run to make sure that didn’t happen again. President Holly Wilkins contacted Vermont Pure (Crystal Rock) and told them what we were looking for. She said it was a fund raising charity event that was meeting at the Blue Cross parking lot in Berlin and we were expecting up to 800 people. We never sold water before and so depended on Vermont Pure’s expertise. After many phone calls back and forth the salesman at Vermont Pure suggested we get a pallet and a half of bottled water.
We were quoted $5.25 per case – 50 cases per pallet. It was suggested we order one and a half pallets. That comes to about 1800 bottles of water for up to 800 people. Sounds like a lot but on a hot August day people could easily drink 2 or 3 bottles and we didn’t want anyone going thirsty. We all know what it’s like being out on hot pavement with nothing to drink. Vermont Pure suggested we have the water delivered directly to Blue Cross as they are already a customer and it would make things easier. Of course we agreed. The maintenance manager at Blue Cross was happy to help us any way he could and received the delivery for us and stored it inside until the day of the Toy Run. We were pretty surprised when we saw the large pallets but having never done this before, didn’t know enough and we were too busy then to count.
Instead of the pallet and a half – 75 cases / 1800 bottles that we ordered, 144 cases / 3486 bottles had been delivered – that is a crazy amount of water for a crowd of up to 800. We contacted Vermont Pure / Crystal Rock to see if they would take back some of the water, it’s still in storage at Blue Cross and still wrapped just a they delivered it. They refused. We did not realize just how much they had delivered and charged us until we received the invoice over a month later – for double what we expected. We asked why 3486 bottles were delivered instead of the 1800 that we ordered and they said “didn’t you count it when it was delivered?” No, we did not count it as it was delivered to an third party, at their suggestion.
So, this is still not resolved. We really want to think this was a simple mistake and not some sort of bait-and-switch, but we’ll see.
It’s really sad that our biggest charity event of the year is subjected to something like this.
