I think such strategies may be poisonous in the longer term. Now you've got to drink that damn orange juice, your business gets a reputation for obsession with rituals involving orange juice, and maybe even people start believing it - or start enjoying being difficult a little too much.
In the same spirit (but for another reason), the famous "Van Halen brown M&Ms clause" [1], which served as a proxy for how likely the venue also read & complied with the safety precautions for the concert.
[1] https://businessofsoftware.org/2013/08/the-truth-about-van-h...
> One important condition is that the company has the hallowed tradition of starting the day’s event at 7 in the morning, with a toast to success, using Orange Juice.
So it's a hypothetical situation, in which the company really needs the juice. In reality, you probably need something else:
> It helps if people come up with a question or a set of questions that serve the equivalent of the Orange Juice Test question.
> If you are a technical manager, it can be as simple as ‘ How do you program feature X or Y ?’
Isolate a hard part of what you need, and ask about the cost of it - that's how I understood the article.
You see this in personal ads all the time. Women get so many low-effort messages they introduce a canary of sorts ("start your response with the word purple") just to filter out the ones who didn't pay any attention to their profile. Reasonable enough, right?
Where it becomes shit-testing is when their profile is a novel-length manifesto. It demands a lot of commitment upfront for no guarantee of returns. But if you're willing to put up with such demands, enjoy pursuing a relationship with someone who makes a game of testing the boundaries of others. It'll be so much fun for you.
> The only response worth serious consideration is ‘we can do this — and this is how much it will cost’.
I'd be livid if I went to the trouble of sourcing juicers, oranges and staff and providing a quote just to be told it was just a test to see if I read the contract.
Clearly, wasting others' time means nothing to the author. Does he also prank call businesses and harass the representatives to test their professionalism?
As with dating, negotiation in bad faith is not a sign of a healthy relationship to come.
When you do big parties like that you don't just randomly distribute servings. I'd have the overfull, 100% real, ten minute old OJ for the guy with the really particular request and could end up serving sunny delight to the cheap seats. To serve 700 people a drink takes a considerable amount of time in and of itself so you have more breathing room than you expect.
This is really common. When you do a wedding the bride and grooms table gets the best looking portions you have, the table next to the bathroom isn't so lucky.
The requirements were clear and specific and you cheated to achieve the goal you assumed, not the goal that was stated.
He also has no clue that it's 2 hours old or 4 hour old.
What he really wants to do is tell his guests "this was fresh squeezed, two hours old" and he will get what he paid for, just like his Maine lobster (thats probably Russian) or softshell crabs from Alaska (China), or Key lime pie (Chinese lime juice). That's how the resturant industry works, this test is useless there.
willcipriano: "This wouldn't work on me, because I'd just do fraud"
If he vendor has to hand squeeze it might be 10$ if they have a machine its 5$ but either one is a valid quote. If someone says no problem we can do it no solution steps are provided then your vendor didn’t examine the problem sufficiently. Keep in mind this was 1980s when auto juicers weren’t common. In modern times a large venue might just be able to do it without any additional expense and absorb some of the cost because markup is high enough
In which case it's the wrong request. The article specifically says it should be a very onerous request.