Trade-offs: Service vs Price

Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Third Degree of Truth.

I have a little print job I’m doing for Spilled Candy. Book catalogs. Yes, color catalogs…4  pages and the kind that I can add separate price lists or additional pages, etc. I got a couple  of price quotes and found that I can get 5000 copies for only a little more than I can get 1000 copies. Hmmm. Sounds good.

Give Your Life Direction

So for about $1,000, I can get 5000 copies from an Internet  company   with   an  excellent  reputation   that friends of mine have used and loved, including shipping direct to my doorstep and  great guarantees.  Not bad at all.

So I put in my order a week or so ago and the company’s botched the proof every time. Nothing’s guaranteed until I’m  happy with the proof.  I can get a great b&w on my personal printer but this company can’t get a good proof for the world.

That and they closed early and left me sitting online and on the line a couple of nights ago, which hit all my buttons. I hate  it when I walk into a store—in a hurry and knowing just what I want—30  minutes before quitting time and they start flickering the lights or vacuuming the  floor  under  my  feet.  I’ll  leave.  Right  then.  And  I won’t come back. But so far, they’ve  never locked  the door and left me inside waiting.

So when I asked a question and they forgot I was on hold for 45 minutes and closed, I was livid.

I decided to take the job to a local company. Not that I’ve cancelled the job yet, but hey, maybe I could get a reasonable price locally and not have to pay the shipping charges.

I called the company I normally use locally, the ones that usually have the best price, and asked for a quote for the exact job the online company was supposed to do for me. I’m, er, not quite sure what to do with this. I saw the numbers and they didn’t register.

Maybe that’s because the quote was for $54,002.00.

Hmph. I guess I’ll try a little harder to work out my differences with the online company.


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