Kinkos
Posted on Saturday, August 20th, 2005 at 13:44.
I often write about outstanding feats of incompetency and today’s subject is Kinkos.
Warning: the following post contains material inappropriate for younger audiences.
Arthur’s mom suggested that Arthur & I make a guestbook for the Austin screening. Great idea! I thought I would take my Barang postcard design, print it onto some cardstock, add some lined paper inside, and bind along the top. Easy, right?
I asked Kinkos Printer-ista Larry if I could print full-bleed. “Oh yes,” he replied. Larry didn’t know that “full-bleed” meant borderless printing to the edge of the paper and that his Kinkos was incapable of printing within an eight inch of the edge.
I tried to give Larry my CD of artwork. He saw that I had my Powerbook and insisted that I go to the laptop station and install the printer drivers to print.
My problem with Kinkos is that the employees are trained to resist assisting customers. You could say that Kinkos prefers that its customers masturbate instead of engaging in intercourse. (Oh yes, I went there.) With gazillions of self-service terminals, Kinkos empowers its customers to make expensive mistakes. What would have been a simple 2-file to double-sided print for the Kinkos print jockey turned into a complicated image-degrading process for me.
But back to the laptop station. There were no printer drivers for me to install. I approached Larry again to ask for the printer drivers. He handed a blank CD-R labeled “Kinkos Printer Drivers” in Sharpie. Obviously, my Powerbook couldn’t do much with a blank CD. Larry did not believe that the CD-R was empty until he observed my Powerbook in person.
Larry then suggested I use the ::insert gag reflex:: Dell workstation (that charged $.40 a minute to use). So I open my artwork in Photoshop because there was no other design or layout software installed on the computer. I meticulously searched the print dialog box to find some way to do duplex printing. Nothing.
Again, I grabbed Larry. Larry’s only suggestion was to print the two graphics and then use the color copier to make a two-sided document. I already gave up on having a full-bleed print and now Larry wanted me to degrade my graphics by a generation because he refused to take 3-minutes and print my document on his much-more-advanced printer behind the counter? Ridiculous! But that’s what I ended up doing. Fortunately, Larry spared 30-seconds of his time to spiral bind the guestbook.
Having worked at a Kinkos competitor during my San Diego stint, I truthfully declare Kinkos print “service” center staff incompetent. I have used Kinkos in Boston, Brookline, and now San Antonio. I have never once had a good customer service experience. Every Kinkos paper pusher that I have encountered is frustrated by customer requests and will lie about anything to get you to leave them alone.
Kinkos’ only redeeming factor is that it isn’t a UPS Mail Boxes Etc.
You shouldn’t have to install printer drivers with OS X unless it’s some very weird printer.
Effed up, eh?
Jeremiah, you live in Boston. Staples headquarters is 20 minutes down the road in Framingham, and features a full feature copy and print center. Unfortunately, without sending it out to a hub (though I am sure there is a local one) we can’t do a full-bleed. However, I am sure that they would be willing to accept a disk, CD, or flash drive (though it is a PC, and doesn’t have photoshop, you could give us an uncompressed tif, and the quality would be the same.) As for pricing, from what I have seen, we usually beat them hands down.
You can even e-mail the file to your local store in PDF, Word, or any supported graphic format! That was easy!
I agree! I have used the Staples print center several times and always with *great* success. However, this was a rush project while in TX and there was not a 24-hour Staples nearby.
JL,
I completly agree. COMPLETLY! I used to think that…maybie in some far off land, other than my city, Kinkos could actually do the stuff they advertise. Sadly, they cannot. Charging people to use their outdated computers at .40 a minute is their specialty. They won’t buy faster computers, or Mac’s due to fears that it won’t take you 40 minutes to send your doc to the printer. Yea, that how long it took to send a 300 DPI 13×19 image to their fu*king printers. I could have bout a 13×19 printer at Stapes for the amount of money they charged me.
I’d like to stick up for my FedEx Kinko’s branch in Santa Cruz, Ca. We can do bleeds. I’ve done them myself. Also, we have several employees who will go to ridiculous lengths to make sure that our customers are happy with the results. The only thing that sucks at Kinkos is the lackluster support for Mac-anything, as no one there seems to have a clue about using a Mac. Barring me from the list, no one even uses it as anything more than an internet-connected jukebox.