e2b to...NOT to be..? Concise Narrative

PLEA OF THE UTMOST URGENCY?

I’m writing this to beseech you to intercede with e2b logistics / Global Infusion Group / Eat to the Beat on behalf of food banks, families & individuals struggling to feed themselves, and for the good of my little one man brand too.

A further 4620 of my sausages are set to expire & become food waste in Eat to the Beat / #BonnieMay's freezers - meals that I have been trying to donate to food banks & charities.

But, rather than agreeing to release this expiring stock & allowing it to alleviate food poverty for thousands, e2b Fulfilment Logistics directors John Ford , Matt Laurenson & Bonnie May continue to attach conditions to its release & to seek advantage.

Please contact them to ask what is going on & to help them see how wrong this is.

Unless we force them into a modicum of reflection & a moment of decency right now, they will have over 11,000 meals of #foodwaste in their freezers - meals they could have decided to give to people who need them.

My dearest wish is for all that read this article to join in a chorus of disapproval. And to pressurise Global Infusion Group not to repeat this crime against all that is humane, with the 25,000 other "sausages that make you smile" set to expire in the New Year.

The article below outlines, and provides evidence of, just some of the other things my little one man brand has experienced at the hands of e2b Logistics.

You can see the evidence by clicking on the links in bold, which will take you to pdfs of emails & other forms of proof / context from a Dropbox folder. If the links don't work properly in this article, you can get the original e2b to NOT to be pdf by clicking here.

This is a genuine David vs Goliath struggle, happening right now, and your support will make all the difference in preventing injustice from triumphing by virtue of resources & might alone.

I've always told the truth and behaved fairly and decently, which I am confident you will see from my emails to e2b in the links below.

You, the good people out there, are the ones who will determine how this narrative ends.

If those who read this; comment, repost & discuss it, we can prevent a bootstrapped independent company (the only loan I've ever taken is the Covid bounce-back one) being discarded & stamped on, by a greedy giant - like Just-Juiced carton.

Every single comment & repost gives me much needed strength for this fight, a battle that I can't afford to lose.

Thank you so much for your time & support, thank you.

& please feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions or would like clearer copies of any of the linked to content [I'm now aware some are in a very small font & hard to read (it's a Mac Mail issue :o( so I recommend reading them on a laptop / desktop and enlarging them]

The Past: 3 Years of Hell

Since July 2020 Big Apple Hot Dogs [BAHD], the much-loved independent brand that I built up from a hot dog cart in Shoreditch 12 years ago,? has had the lifeblood sucked out of it. Not by COVID or the current crises, but by GIG - a shambolic & shameless Goliath Vampire of a corporation, whose clients include Coldplay, Glastonbury Festival and The National television Awards. GIG contacted me in July 2020 to tout their storage and fulfilment services, since they were desperate for revenue because the pandemic had wiped out their festival &?tour catering business. I also experienced all my revenue disappearing overnight, at the onset of the pandemic, but after months of 18-hour days & frozen fingers I had successfully pivoted into online retail. Business was booming and the future looked bright once more. But, having misrepresented their grasp of technology, processes, facilities and their entire culture, GIG/e2b has caused devastation to my business by operating at inconceivable levels of incompetence, over-charging at an eye-watering scale and failing to respond to queries, provide evidence or any way to minimise the losses and damage my company has been sustaining. To compound the damage they have seized BAHD’s stock, refused to let me monetise it and allowed thousands of items to become food waste, in an attempt to hold me over a barrel & bully their way out of being held accountable for, amongst other things:

Their 940% increase in Big Apple’s storage charges over 18-months, without agreement, replies to my constant queries or my requests for details of the methodology GIG/e2b were using &?the source data, and without the slightest increase in benefit to my company, customers or suppliers. The initial average storage cost was ￡1.09 per Big Apple order - ballooning to ￡15.50 per order by November 2021 - the point at which I insisted on a full explanation before full payment.?Information which, one year on, they still?have not provided.?

The abysmal 26.7% error rate that GIG/e2b admitted operating at on BAHD’s orders, whereas the industry average error rate is 1-3%.?N.B. Every single error decimates the potential and the viability of any online business, with just one negative experience preventing?more than half?of customers coming back.?

Never providing a service level agreement explaining their responsibilities or my rights, instead they allowed me to spend 18 months packing & shipping missing items & replacement orders from my HQ at Big Apple’s own cost. Only by chance did I discover that customers had the right to free replacement of missing items & refunds for lost stock (if e2b were at fault) and that GIG/e2b had been withholding this from BAHD.

Their arithmetically and technologically “challenged” accounts department that failed to submit invoices from July to December 2021, or any payment reminders. And then sending inaccurate & unreasonable payment demands and greeting explanatory & conciliatory emails from a distressed customer with contemptuous disregard.

Despite the e2b/GIG Operations manager admitting over-charging & errors in storage, John Ford refusing to discuss or reflect, for even a second, and summarily throwing my business and my family’s future under the bus.?

Not responding to solutions offered by Big Apple or replying to queries on the paranormal significant decrease in pallet numbers of the seized stock, despite no orders being fulfilled.?This drop is never reflected in payment demands from GIG/e2b and never gives them pause for thought on the whole fiasco, which is their pallet charging & invoicing processes.

Not once offering the slightest compromise, or accepting arbitration, and instead?instructing their lawyers to threaten legal action via an extravagantly inept & misleading Letter Before Action.? A legal letter which featured a host of inaccuracies, including?demanding a sum which omitted credits from Big Apple and which they sent (by email only) to a random email address of persons unknown.

Inflicting even more damage by, unnecessarily, obliging me to incur legal fees (currently standing at almost ￡8k) to respond to their letter before action, and to have any chance of justice.?

The above is just a tiny glimpse into the chaos that reigns at GIG/e2b, which is all a matter of record, evidenced by the 1083 emails that I was forced to write e2b alone, trying to get info & to minimise the damage being done.?

Quantifying Incalculable Harm

My lawyers have asked me to calculate what GIG/e2b’s abject failings have cost my business - a soul—destroying & impossible task. But I’ve made a start, as follows:

￡1,739.524 spent on an IT consultant (writing code to workaround e2b’s ongoing incapacities)

79% refund on over-charging for storage.?From e2b’s own stock report + my own product info, I have now calculated my frozen stock to be approx. 6.55 Cubic Metres (2943kg)?Which is 3.64 pallets.?Though GIG/e2b invoiced me for 18 pallets, yet?their own invoices show it is quite simply impossible for my stock to be anywhere near what they had been charging me for months (but without actually submitting their invoices).?

Yet, 11 months ago now, John Ford paralysed my business without explaining how my costs per CBM had gone up 284% (from ￡38.34 per CBM of frozen product to an unsustainable?￡147.13 ) in just over a year and despite my constant & unanswered queries. ?

It’s very hard not to see this as a conscious decision to profiteer in the knowledge that Nationwide there was no frozen storage capacity available, anywhere.?I should know, I had been desperately seeking salvation since March 21 when it took e2b 4 months to respond to storage queries and they admitted to charging me for other customers pallets.?

To add insult to injury, GIG’s rate is ￡12.50 per pallet, meaning GIG/e2b is invoicing me for 400% more volume than my stock?actually occupies, at a pallet rate 267% higher than that of my new fulfilment company, which operates at an order error rate 133400% superior to e2b’s (yep that’s more than one hundred & thirty three thousand percent! 0.02% error rate for Magnavale Ltd , compared to e2b’s 26.7%.) ?

It’s all?just plain wrong on every level, and in every sense.

Compensation for e2b order errors? (the average cost per error is anywhere from ￡43 to ￡257 or an 11-13% drain on profitability.)

￡66,825.78 retail value of the Big Apple Hot Dogs stock perishing in e2b’s freezers.

￡7956.50 My lawyers fees as of 27th October 2022

The most heart-breaking aspect to try & quantify is the loss to my business of the 3000 hours of my time sucked up (since July 2020) by initiating 1083 emails to e2b, alone not to mention all the emails to confused & frustrated customers. ?

It’s painful to imagine the difference between my current plight and where I might be, if?those 3000 hours could have been devoted to forging ahead, rather than being held back so utterly.?

Had e2b been moderately reasonable and semi-competent,?I dare say that by now my business might have been flourishing, and the future for my family relatively secure. I might have even be some way towards achieving my dream of growing BAHD by helping others, via The Big Apple Cart Collective. But now, because of one company’s catastrophic inadequacies, so many lives are damaged and so much potential wasted.

The Present - Wasting Away ?

Meanwhile at GIG/e2b HQ:?

1,460 of my sausages & 3,906 buns?plus numerous desserts, toppings & drinks?are now?#Food-waste having passed their sell by date: Preventable #FoodWaste caused by this deaf, dumb & blind oaf of an organisation’s continued refusal to let me sell it.?

4620 more sausages are due to expire on the 20th of November 2022 in Eat to The Beat’s freezers, yet they boast about their green credentials at Glastonbury? &?hypocritically post on Instagram about how much they are reducing their carbon footprint.?

And all this at a time when so many good people out there are having to choose between heating & eating.

It’s all so dispiriting and just so incredibly wrong.

Briefing & preparing evidence for the lawyers forced me to relive the misery & helplessness of witnessing the GIG / e2b directors?Matt Laurenson & John Ford ignore my pleas &?my goodwill and proceed to suck up the profits, tarnish the reputation & senselessly cripple my little company.?This reliving made me realise that even if?there was a settlement or court award, there is no sum that could fully erase the experience of the last few years. And win, lose?or draw I will always be plagued by “what might have beens”.?

The one thing I can do though, is to?bring what has been happening out into the open. So that others can learn from my misfortune.?

E2b Logistics was my first experience of 3rd party logistics, so I didn’t even know that professional fulfilment partners?offered detailed fulfilment and?/ or service level agreements, an innocence that was ruthlessly exploited by e2b logistics, by not giving Big Apple any of the agreements they gave their other clients. Which suggests that even at the very start, after they had contacted me & persuaded me that they were going to provide amazing services for my business, they never really meant it. And I suspect they knew full well that they were only ever really going to service themselves. ?

Please do visit our Get BAHD to Do Real Good page to follow and support my efforts to bring them to book, and follow us (me ;o) on SM @BigAppleHotDogs

Thank you so much for your time. ?

Hearing any opinions, suggestions or questions that you have, would mean the world to me. ?

So please do get & stay in touch.

With every best wish?