120 Business Cards for the Recycling Bin

A Montreal printing business asserts on its rights and scares off customers

The back of my new business cards look and feel beautiful. I applied hand-printed japanese paper on it. The recto of the new business cards looked good until they were cut by a Montreal's digital print shop. Centre d'affaires Montreal did a really bad job and cut my cards 2 mm smaller than indicated.

I went back to the shop and tried to negotiate to get the cards reprinted for free, but the instead they argued that the bad cut was my fault, because the paperweights were different and the cards were supposingly difficult to cut. If they were not able to do the job properly, why didn't they advice me? No chance to get money back, especially because I had paid already...

When I used to live in Germany I remember that I gave a design job to the print shop TOPP KOPIE Digitalprint and Copyservice GmbH in Muenchen (Munich). It was by my own fault that a job of 120 EUR was badly printed (wrong positioning). What happened was that they reprinted the job for their own fees. They understand customer service - and a happy client is the best promotion!

I told this story to a local person here in Montreal and this person advised me that I can forget about this kind of customer service in North America and that I should get used to the mentality of money-making rather than satisfying the client. Worked over in this emotionally exited state, another person's comment was: "I hope you are not going to leave Montreal because of this..."

Right now I am debating about recycling or using these business cards and promote instead the bad service done by Centre d'affaires Montreal. This will result in 120 more lost costumers - a number, which not even includes their word-to-mouth effects...