17 Feb
Places To Avoid: Staples
Over the past few weeks Patrick and I have been talking about a plethora of business things.
He will be doing a presentation at SXSW this year to promote his book and he asked me if I knew of any good places to go for business cards.
I can now safely tell him two places to not go.
The first one is Overnight Prints. I just had a long-time friend use them and the cards were horrible. The print on them was misaligned and they needed these cards for a meeting with a VC. So yeah… not cool.
The second place is my own experience. Before heading off to Startup Weekend I realized that I was nearly out of business cards. In a bind I visited the online arm of Staples and saw they do business cards that you can send the design for online and then pickup in store.
So of course knowing I was in a tight spot with under a week I ordered 200 cards online. The quality can’t be that bad… could it?
I WAS DEAD WRONG.
I know that it is my fault for the most part seeing as how I could have ordered cards in advance and got them done somewhere local (more on that to come) but I’ve been really busy as of late working on closing something major for the company and haven’t had time to watch my “business card stock levels” very closely.
Onward with the point of this post though… which is to show you the “quality” you can expect at Staples.
I didn’t get the more expensive card stock because the site actually recommended the regular stock. I assumed the stock wouldn’t be all that bad… it isn’t… but it isn’t that great either.
The cards are TERRIBLE. Staples is TERRIBLE. The cards had the most piss poor cut I’ve ever seen.
See that white line at the top of the card? Yeah that is the way they cut it, boxed it, then sold it to me. Not all cards are like this but out of 200 cards a great deal of them had quite simply piss poor cuts.
I suspected the cutting would be terrible so I specifically asked for black card stock. That way if the cut was a terrible shitty cut it wouldn’t stick out as much.
If they were going to make the cards on white stock then why even bother offering the black stock?
The printing and cutting was horribly aligned on almost all of the cards, the color was inconsistent from one card to the next, and when I ordered online I paid for 200 and it said they were giving me another 100 free because of a promotion. Did I get the extra 100 free? Nope… and when I asked later for them they told me that promo only applied if I asked for it when picking up.
Think about this for a second… if I asked at pickup they would have had to make the extra 100 cards. Does that make any sense? Why not just make the extra 100 instead of making just the 200 and then if I want to actually get what the site promised me not make me wait another few hours just to get another hundred cards.
Shit.
I’m going to tell EVERYONE I know that Staples for business cards is the BIGGEST mistake you can make. Even in emergency situations where you just need something to get you through they make the shittiest of the shity cards.
