Hot take: my back bar got hit by a bad batch of developer and I lost two color clients in one day
Last Tuesday I mixed a level 7 ash for a regular who has been coming to me in Portland for four years, and her roots lifted orange while the mids went muddy gray. Turns out the gallon of 20 volume I grabbed that morning was from a lot that sat in a hot stockroom, and the second client that afternoon had the same mess on her foils. Does anyone else check lot numbers on developer before opening, or am I the only one who got lazy and paid for it?
The part about the developer sitting in a hot stockroom really stands out to me, because that is how a lot of quiet problems start. Nobody labels the box, nobody mentions the delivery sat on a dock all afternoon, and by the time it reaches your chair the damage is already baked in. It is the same way old milk, bad gas, or expired medicine gets past us, the failure happens way upstream and the person at the end just eats it.