Signed on Friday, damage found on Monday: seven days, twenty-one days, in writing

The pallet came through the back door on Friday evening, the delivery note was signed, the driver pulled away. Over Saturday and Sunday the store ran at its own pace: the crates went into the cold room and nobody opened them one by one. On Monday morning, on the way to the shelf, part of the batch turned out to be spoiled. The argument about where the damage happened is only starting, while the clock on the notice period has been running since Friday evening.

Article 889 of the Turkish Commercial Code splits that clock into three. Where loss or damage is apparent from outside and nobody raises it by the moment of handover, the goods are presumed to have been delivered in conformity with the contract; the second paragraph carries the same presumption over to damage that does not show, once seven days have passed since delivery. Delay runs in a lane of its own: under the third paragraph, a consignee who fails to tell the carrier within twenty-one days of delivery that the transit time was exceeded loses the rights arising from that delay, so here the Code stops short of a presumption and simply ends the right.

Putting that calendar on your own dates takes a minute. Take delivery on Friday evening and day seven lands on the Friday of the week that follows; open the crate on Monday morning and you are standing on day three, with four days left for the measurements, the photographs, the internal e-mails and the letter itself. Handover starts the count, and opening the container neither stops it nor sets it running again, so a weekend during which nobody looked inside is simply part of the seven. The article does not describe them as working days either; the text says seven days after delivery and leaves it there. The same arithmetic feels comfortable on morning drops and tight on evening and weekend ones, which is why stores that cannot open every case at the door do better to write day seven onto the delivery note while the driver is still standing there.

What has to be inside the notice. The first paragraph sets one short, hard test for the content: the damage has to be stated with the necessary clarity and characterised. "The goods arrived spoiled" fails that test; which shipment, which delivery note number, how many cases, which product, when the container was opened and by whom, and what was found on opening all belong in the text. The characterising part is a job in itself, since thawing, crushing, wetting and delay attach to different paragraphs of the same article and to different deadlines. Once the photographs, the logger printout and the product temperature measured at the store door sit in one folder, the letter that leaves on day seven stops being a claim and becomes an account somebody can follow.

All of these steps sit on the same chain, so the notice calendar belongs inside the warehouse to store distribution plan itself.

The form hardens the moment the file turns from a notice into a demand. Article 18(3) requires that, between merchants, notices and warnings which place the other side in default, terminate the contract or withdraw from it travel through a notary, by registered letter, by telegram, or through the registered electronic mail system with a secure electronic signature. The same route comes back in Article 855(4): a sender or consignee who has claimed their rights against the carrier within one year in the manner of that paragraph may raise them as a defence at any time afterwards. An evening message from the warehouse manager will hold the seven-day window, and it does nothing for either of those two steps. This is also where the Code falls silent: Article 889 says nothing about who opens the case, who has to be present, or what record is kept of the opening, and that part is left to the contract and to the store's own goods-in routine.

What a signed consignment note assumes. The strongest piece of paper on the other side of the table is the consignment note. Under Article 858(2), a note signed by both parties raises a presumption that the goods and their packaging were in apparent good condition when they were taken over, and that the number of packages, their marks and their numbers match the entries on the note. What breaks that presumption is a reservation written onto the note on justified grounds; the same paragraph accepts the absence of suitable means to check those entries as one such ground. A single line like "lid fogged, three cases wet" can carry the whole of Monday's conversation.

The presumption the note raises reaches as far as outward appearance and no further; what went on inside a closed container during the run is something only a record can tell seven days later, and the evidence brought to the table is usually one of two things. Supplement 12 to Annex 5 of WHO Technical Report Series 992 asks, in clause 2.6, that for road shipments in passive containers the recorders sit next to the product without touching the cold source, and that the containers stay closed for the whole journey. A unit log measuring the air inside the body shows that the vehicle was working; a continuous curve recorded beside the product inside a sealed container shows what the product itself went through, and that is exactly what the argument is about.