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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/ScientistOtherwise34 on 2025-08-26 22:38:48+00:00.
In the 70's(yes I am old) I worked for a small fabrication shop. I filled several roles. One was billing and one was accounts receivables. We had a machine shop as well. One of our clients was a rather large maker of a specialty truck product. They would order certain parts from us to use on the trucks. This required the machine shop to make the dies and then we would make the parts. They would constantly make changes. Our contract said they would pay for any increase in cost. Now the change orders might add 2 to 5 cents per part. They would say alright and we would produce the new part. We would send the invoice for the new part. which would get rejected because the contract said the part was 35 cents each, not 38 cents each. I would have to explain that they had changed the order so they had to pay the new price. They would refuse and would only pay the original price. Finally I stopped the plant from making the parts that they were not paying the proper price for. They used a JIT (just in time) inventory system so they had no backstock in inventory when we stopped shipping. They called in a panic. Where were the parts. We told they refused to pay so we refused to ship. We went back and forth for a few days, then we had a check and all change orders were approved. The week they were down cost them several hundreds of thousands of dollars. The total of the difference between the original price and the new price on the parts was around $250 total. After the contracts were up, they found another machine shop. And they wanted the tools and dies we made. Cost them a pretty penny for those and they balked, so we would not ship them out. More downtime. You would think they would learn but they started doing the other shop the same.