Abstract
A contract is can recognized as an accord between two or more groups that bind them to be able to offer specific goods or services. It is used to carry out the business activities as it is the documentation tool that steers the business procedures. The agreement can be either oral or written. In business, one party may fail to meet the required obligations this is termed as a breach of contract. A breach may also occur when another party makes it impossible for the other group to be able to perform his responsibilities. A breach may be harmful to the parties or it may be considered a minor. In the case of a minor breach, the parties involved will have to avoid a lawsuit and work out a solution (Bly, 2010).
Breaching a business contract
Take a case study of Mycine who deals with the sale of imported musical instruments. He writes a poster at his shop stating the sale of a trumpet at $500. Deny passes by and sees the poster. Interested in the offer he gets into the shop and presents to Mycine his interest to buy the trumpet. However, he has no money they get into negotiations and finally they come to an agreement that the trumpet will be sold after a week if Deny is not able to raise the money by then. After three days, Deny gets the money and tries to contact Mycine in no avail. He, therefore, leaves a voice message on his handset stating that he has the money but will come to collect the trumpet on Saturday.
Before Mycine’s could read the message, Dave, Mycine’s brother deletes all the voice messages in the handset to create space after attempting to download some music and the hand seems to have low-memory space. The next day another customer gets to Mycine’s shop with $500 and requests to buy the trumpet on a cash basis. Mycine sells the trumpet and send a rider to Deny’s house to deliver a letter stating that he had already sold the trumpet. Unfortunately, the rider delivers the letter to the wrong address.
On Saturday, Deny goes to Mycine’s shop to buy the trumpet with a hired vehicle to assist in transportation and finds the trumpet sold. In this case, there is a breach of the contract made between Mycine and Deny. An offer was made and an agreement was done. If this case is to be taken by law, Deny would argue that the terms of his offer were clear and a definite deadline for payment of the $500 was set thus demonstrating the intention to make the statement binding. On the phone message left by Deny on Mycine's Phone, it is debatable to state that deletion of the message has no negative effective effect on the agreements.
For the part of the court, it would consider Mycine to have been under no binding act as he sent a letter to serve a notice of revocation. Unfortunately, he remains bound by the agreement terms as once an offer is accepted it cannot be revoked. In this case, the breach is a minor, thus substantial performance will apply as it states, “if a breach is a minor the non breaching party may sue the breaching party to reclaim the cost to fix the defect if the breaching party has previously been paid.” The law of inferior performance and material breach would not apply in the case between Mycine and Deny (Pearson Education, 2010). In inferior performance and material breach, a material breach occurs when one of the concerned parties renders inferior performance of his actual responsibilities that may destroy the meaning and terms of the contract. This happens simultaneously one case after another. The non-breaching party may reverse the agreement and recover reconstitution or support the contract and regain the damages.
In summary, breaching of contracts the main elements that constitute a contract, have to be looked upon in detail to determine if either has been surpassed. The law requires that for the formation of a contract the parties have to offer a corresponding acceptance, a consideration, and an intention to create legal relations.