I'd focus less on the name of the test. It's a story that's being passed down from someone else to someone else.

None of these people are booking banquet halls and asking about orange juice.

The setup is kind of ridiculous and I suspect just a little bit made up just to give it a pithy name that makes people say "What's the orange juice test?" so you can go into this whole spiel about banquet halls.

The core idea is sound: Don't work with people who either don't know what they're doing or try to make your decisions for you. But I wouldn't work with anybody calling it the orange juice test either, because it seems like something someone made up to feel smart by knowing arbitrary jargon.

Here's where I think you and others are missing something. Orange juice is in the hypothetical that they are discussing. There's nothing that says you have to make up a request. It can be a legitimate request, it just wasn't in the hypothetical.

The key thing is whether the response is "that's impossible" or "you can have that for this price." In the anecdote, the businessman told Gerald that he'd already passed the test.