Why Was: US Military Dead during Iraq War 1813

Spellet with two T's in Norwegian.

If they go to somewhere else than the account that bought the stuff.

The following describes the normal state of affairs before the EU Internal Market and the EES treaty.

The normal setup for a large organization was to have open accounts with suppliers. Monthly payments were done, but they were estimates, usually a precentage point or two above what the end price would be.

The accounts were normally closed yearly and a fine-grained Debt Settlement was done. This is where the discounts were computed. It was normal to have a volume-based discount that was settled based on actual use. There were then normally some paybacks, or credits on the december invoice. I can find no better English translation for these than rebates. These often were hidously complex. Telco deals were the worst; but peripherals and media supplies were hairy as well.

There was usually a set of ritual haggling for these "rebates", and for next year's terms around Christmas. December 17th was The Great Cutoff Date (Dec 31 minus two weeks); all orders had to be in by that date to qualify for "rebates-discounts" that year.

If you neglected to parttake in this round you could be out a lot of money. And the December 17th deadline was absolute. It was not uncommon to have a spontaneous Christmas brunch on the 18th or th 19th for bits of "extra" unbudgeted return money.

The EU IM and the EES treaty put limitations to this way of operating. Such a floating discount scale is not illegal, but the handling of it must be performed according to pretty strict rules; and those make such "great chrismas haggling" rounds infeasible.

The limitations specifically forbid such "after-the-fact" haggling; the scale has to be published before the transactions happen. Of course, haggling over interpretations still happen.

-- mrr