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Notes -
How come they hadn't repudiated the contract if they didn't pay the late fees?
I'm guessing you never had to deal with business decisions before. Technically, you'd have to ask them, but based on the advice I give, most businessmen have an intuitive understanding that late payment is better than no payment and that bad customers are better than no customers. I don't know that failure to pay a late fee would have been grounds to terminate that particular contract, but even if it did, what of it? Now they have to find someone else to buy 12,000 tons of metallurgical coal per week, with no guarantee that they're going to get a similar price or that the new customer is going to be any better at paying than the old customer. It reminds me of what the owner of a bar I used to frequent once said. He was complaining about how one of his cooks quit without notice a couple weeks after she was hired. Mildly sympathetic, I said "Good help's hard to find." He replied "Bad help's hard to find! I gave up on good help 20 years ago!"
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