|
Hi
All,
Since Brian has said my decription of the printing problems is
'incomplete', I will add a copy of my letter
to the print company (dated May 11, 2003) to the end of this email. It
tells the rest of the story, and I hope this discussion ends
here.
I'm sorry Brian had to bring this up,
since neither Brian's nor the Printing company's name was -never-
mentioned. The reason we did not
have a calendar last year, was I did not want to go through this nightmare
again. That is why I was asking for a printer who would actually conform
to the specific guidelines in that email. The reason I asked for someone
who would specifically stand up to support the printer in the event of any
problems, is because Brian would not.
And as for "resulted in the printer refusing to do any further
business with him", that's actually laughable since I never approached them with
any other print job -- why would I after the last
fiasco?
I'm glad to see Brian passionately support this
printer, but bear in mind he refused to get involved when we were in the
middle of this whole mess?
-Dave
(Faxed
May 12,
2003
12:30
AM to
(***) ***-****)
Dear [Print Shop
Name] :
Enclosed is payment for the 2003 Forward Look Calendar
order.
The amount is less than the amount on the invoice for
several reasons that are enumerated below.
We are considering this payment as
payment in full. Depositing or
cashing this check will constitute agreement to these terms.
Lack of Communication and the
Delays:
On
December 6th before we overnighted M*** H***** the
CD
containing
the final and complete layout of the calendar, we
asked him if it would still be possible to have the job completed by the end of
2002; his answer was "not a problem".
The CD was mailed December 7th. According to the tracking information,
M*** had the files on December
9th.
Now, if the calendars were a few days, or even a couple of weeks
late, the timeliness would not have been much of an issue. We know the Publisher files CD was sent
rather late, but M*** was aware of
the situation all through November and December. We have his emails that prove
this.
We also
have emails from M*** stating that
they did not
even start looking at the calendar files until January. Never was the delay communicated to us,
nor were any of my phone calls returned during
December.
The
first communications we received about the lateness of the calendar were from
M*** (Jan 4th): “I apologize for not contacting you
sooner. We had
an extraordinarily busy December and I've had some technical difficulties with
Publisher 2002 and our imagesetter system. We plan to have the imagesetter up
and running today and I will be working on the calendar this weekend and with
any luck we will have it on the press next week.”
We both are aware that you had a problem with your presses that
required two days to clean. We are
both also aware that you had difficulties with the color separations. Based on the time from when we were
notified of the separation problems, and the date on which you mentioned the
calendar was on the press, nearly two months went by. We have a difficult time believing that
you worked on this problem all day long for two straight months. It appears as if a job that was already
late was “put on the back burner”, making the completion date even later
still.
I gave these files to our graphic designer at work, and she was
able to make color separations in about 30 seconds, so we are unaware of what
your exact problem was. But
whatever the problem was, there was no communication of the problem, the status,
or the resolution as time dragged on.
Quality Issues:
When the first 25 calendars arrived, this graphic designer also
pointed out that the colors on a few months were not in good alignment. You can notice it easily when looking at
the dates in blue on the calendar portion of the lower page; they are
fuzzy. She told me that if we were
having these printed for one of our clients, our company would have rejected
them due to this. However, we are
not penalizing nor complaining about the quality. It is sufficient for our
needs.
Another
issue is the printing error on the "About the FLML" page. What should be a transparent oval GIF,
is instead an oval in a large white rectangle. This is not a huge problem, but it could
have easily been prevented if we had been provided with
a proof as in the past; we were not.
Pricing:
Our
payment calculation comes to this:
Since no notification of the price increase over the previous year’s job
was given until after the first claimed shipment date, we, as the
purchaser, did not
have any choice in whether or not we would accept the terms of this job – also
known as ‘the right to refusal’. At
$7.81 per calendar, we would have chosen a different printing company. No notification was given that the terms
of the job were dependent on the cost of neither your films nor your time, so
they may not be used as justification for the higher price.
Therefore, the commonly accepted reasonable and established price
for the terms of this job falls to the historical price per item as set per
terms of the previous year’s agreement.
A
calendar must be, by its very definition, timely. Any delay in receiving the calendars
would result in portions of the calendar being essentially useless. As the calendars were not received until
March 13th, approximately 2 ½ months (or 20.8%) of the usefulness of
the calendar has expired and cannot be paid
for.
There
were 28 refunded pre-sales due to the very late delivery. We are therefore stuck with 28 extra
units of the original 400 ordered.
Since you provided 40
extra copies above what was ordered, we will consider those
extras as the compensation for lost sales.
No cost
for our time to answer over 250 emails to explain the late delivery of the
calendar has been considered in
this calculation.
The cost
for dealing with an investigation by PayPal for “fraud” instigated by a customer
angry over the late delivery has been considered in
this calculation.
In
previous transactions, shipping costs have been incurred by the seller, and will
be considered as
such for this transaction as no notification of a change in policy was
communicated.
Note: At the time when F****** gave us the cost of
the calendars over the phone, he asked if we were pleased with the price. I specifically told him that no, we were
not pleased, and gave a few of the reasons why. F****** stated at that time that he
would give us a call back to further discuss the pricing. To date, F****** has never
called.
We regret having to take this course of action, but feel we have
been left with little choice in this matter. We hope you understand our
position.
*************************************************************
To unsubscribe or set your subscription options,
please go to
http://lists.psu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=l-forwardlook&A=1
| 
Back to the Home of the Forward Look Network