Where Did the Extra $100 Go?

Last Friday, a gentleman who looked about my age walked into my little photo and printing shop.

He had a simple question.

“How much would it cost to print 100 color brochures?”

They were standard tri-fold brochures, printed double-sided on ordinary copy paper.

I gave him a price:

$100 plus tax.

He looked pleasantly surprised.

Then he told me that the last printing service he had used had charged him $200 plus tax for what sounded like essentially the same job.

I didn't think much about it.

We started with a black-and-white sample.

Then I printed a color sample.

He checked everything carefully. Once he confirmed that he was happy with the layout and colors, I printed all 100 copies.

It didn't take very long.

Before leaving, however, he asked me a question.

“Can you fold them with a machine?”

I explained that we don't have an automatic folding machine in our little shop.

We do have a creasing machine, but we normally use it for heavier materials such as cardstock. For ordinary copy paper, folding by hand is actually quite easy and fast—especially for only 100 sheets.

And then, suddenly, I understood something.

Maybe the other printing service hadn't simply charged him twice as much for printing.

Maybe they had included a folding service.

Perhaps the extra $100 wasn't really for the printing at all.

It was for everything that happened after the printing.

That little realization made me think about the difference between a small neighborhood print shop and a larger commercial printing company.

A professional printing company can have all kinds of specialized equipment. Automatic folding machines, cutting machines, creasing machines, binding equipment, packaging systems...

And all of those machines cost money.

So naturally, those services have to be included in the price.

At a small shop like ours, things are different.

Sometimes the most efficient solution is simply to look at the job and ask:

What does the customer actually need?

In this case, he needed 100 brochures that were printed in color, double-sided, and folded into thirds.

He didn't necessarily need a machine to fold them.

For ordinary paper, two hands can do the job perfectly well.

That doesn't mean one way is right and the other is wrong.

It simply means that there are different ways of getting to the same destination.

And sometimes, when you walk into a small neighborhood shop, you may find that the person behind the counter is thinking less about which service to add to the invoice and more about how to get the job done.

That's one of the things I like about running a little shop.

Every job is different.

A customer may come in for a passport photo, a restored family photograph, a canvas print, a few posters—or 100 tri-fold brochures.

We look at the job, figure out what is actually required, make a sample, check it with the customer, and then do the work.

Sometimes there is a machine.

Sometimes there isn't.

And sometimes the simplest tool is still the fastest one:

your hands.

As for that gentleman, I don't know exactly what his previous $200 quote included.

Maybe folding really was part of it.

Maybe there were other finishing services as well.

But I'm glad he told me.

Because otherwise, I would never have realized where that mysterious extra $100 might have gone.

And perhaps that's another small lesson from running a neighborhood shop:

The price of a job isn't always the price of the paper and ink. Sometimes you're paying for the machine, sometimes for the labor, and sometimes simply for the convenience.

At our little shop, we just try to figure out which of those things you actually need.