By: craig

craig — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 00:03:14 +0000

I used to work at a Kinko’s, and the problem you speak of is endemic to that company. At least at the location that I worked at, the focus from the store and regional management was on the high volume, corporate account holders. Although they market themselves as kind of an in’n'out service provider for individuals, the truth is that tiny, “insignificant” projects are not what they’re after. The store’s profits are based around how many “clicks” they can run on all of the printing machines in a given time period (however often they compute their revenue numbers). So basically, the idea is to have the machines running high volume jobs at all times (and to be fair, the type of machines they use are designed to produce high-volume, low quality output). It’s next to impossible to stop a job of 10,000 prints to run a simple, quick-turnaround job, because they see that as a loss of revenue. Besides that, the management and sales team are the most insidious bunch of brown-nosers, what they will do to satisfy account holders at the expense of the walk-in customer is beyond belief.

At my store, there was a large self-service area, which is where you would be not-so-kindly directed to if you had a project of, say, under 500 copies of anything (save for oversize posters or special orders). However, they disfavor the use of “self-serve” because that scares customers away – the area was staffed, so theoretically you could always get help. The staff was specifically trained NOT to do jobs for people, but to “encourage self reliance” by showing people how to use the machines. However, this area was of course chronically understaffed. Believe me, the production crew did NOT like having to go to the self-help area to clear a paper jam out of a copier for an elderly customer!

So yes, terrible customer service + lack of staffing + suck-up management amounts to a pretty miserable experience to do business, and to work for, Kinko’s.

Comments on: Head Injuries R’Us

By: craig