Adjusted Gross Margin

You have sales. Like...18 million bucks worth of parrot cages with tiny parrot-swear-words engraved in the railing ("Polly wants a ******* cracker").

To buy the wire, the base, then the labor to mold and tie it all together...in total, that part cost you 8 million bucks, so you have 10 million in gross profit and 10 over 18 in gross margin.

So what's adjusted then about this margin? Curveball expenses and ambiguous sales. Like...you find out 90 days later that 5 percent of the cages were returned because Polly crawled out, so sales weren't really 18 million. More like 17 million or thereabouts. And the wire for the cages? It had lead in it. You dumped. And then you were fined by the garbage company 500 grand, so your expenses in delivering that product were more like 10.5 mil instead of 10.

Adjusting gross margin is what keeps the asterisk factories alive in this country. Each adjustment has to be noted in painful detail, because Polly really does want that ******* cracker.