Two days after taking a job for Tesla, owner of The Giving Pies got a simple text message canceling the order
A catering contract to celebrate Black Heritage Month turned into a tough lesson for a Black-owned bakery in the South Bay earlier this month.
What started as a $16,000 deal ended up costing the small business owner thousands of dollars instead.
On Valentine’s Day, the owner of The Giving Pies in San Jose’s Willow Glen neighborhood received a pretty sweet call from a representative with Tesla: a catering job for thousands of mini-pies for a Black History Month event.
Owner Voahangy Rasetarinera, who started the business out of her home in 2017, says both sides agreed on a quote and exchanged an invoice for 4,000 pies for delivery this week. Because of the tight turnaround, Rasetarinera asked staff to work extra hours, she bought ingredients and packaging supplies and declined at least three other catering jobs.
I don’t think you can bring a lawyer to small claims court, to prevent this exact scenario. Tesla might send a manager or nobody. They can’t send their legal team.
IDK if 16k is small claims, but if it is, she should definitely take it there.
You can’t sue for the whole amount if you don’t actually deliver the items. Unless the contract specifically states the entire amount is non-refundable.
You don’t have a right to the profit, but you could probably get your costs and labor back. It might be easy. They might not even show up.
$5k is the cap in my state. Should be similar in scope there.
Source
Small claims court rules vary widely from state to state, so it’s a complete crapshoot to guess for anyone else.
Some states bar attorneys altogether, others do not; some allow attorneys in but do not allow them to directly act for their client, etc.
The total dollar amount and type of suit you can bring in small claims also differs from state to state, and can change from year to year as laws governing small claims court are rewritten. Last year your state’s dollar limit might have been $7k, but it got raised by the state legislature and this year it’s $10k.
Even the name varies from state to state (“magistrate’s court” instead of small claims, for example).
So never assume anything about small claims court remains the same from state to state. If anyone thinks they have a small claims case, their FIRST stop should be doing a search on “small claims court rules for [state]” and looking at the web pages maintained by that state to keep from wasting time. Small claims courts are usually very friendly to pro se plaintiffs (people who act as their own attorneys) and publish really good information on how to do it yourself, just be sure to hit the state’s own pages first before trusting anything else.