Market Pricing Survey For Independent Printers

One thing all small printers want to improve is the way we price our service. There is a cost component that each print shop has intimate knowledge of. There is also another component that exists outside our control, but one that we cannot ignore. And that is what all other printers do in the market and the motivation for our survey.

It should be noted that comparison should be made in the context of all else being equal; if excellence in quality and service is a component of your cost, then it should be added on top of the commodity price.

That said, suppose you use the cost plus method to come up with the price. You could adjust up and down a little based on known prices by a few competitors in the same class of service. But this is hardly confidence inspiring. You want to know a wider price range from a larger number of competitors and with confidence.

Why? We all know the reasons:

• If your cost based price is low compared to the market, you are lean, mean, smart and efficient and you should raise your profit. You earned it.

• If your cost based price is high compared to the market, you have to be concerned. You could lose potential sales as well as existing customers. If one of your customers is seduced with low price by a competitor, your account could be in jeopardy. Keep in mind, loyalty can afford you a reasonable but only reasonable premium. Moreover, it points to a more important question on the efficiency of your operations - from purchasing, to capital equipment, to worker training, to business process.

• You can approach potential customers with new authority on market pricing. Better yet, you can show off your exceptional value, independently validated by a third party - as we will now show you!

These are important reasons. You should know, and know with confidence.

In an effort to provide value to our small printers community, we built an application called the iMyck Price Checker as a tool to address this pricing issue. First, we run an automated web scraper program to collect prices available on the Internet. These are prices Southern California print shops publish on their websites. At this point, we have surveyed several dozens of semi-randomly selected companies and collected about fifty thousand data points. Second, we performs analysis against this survey data to give you an estimated percentile of any price you enter into the system. The we provide friendly graphical user interface to let you see where your price stands compared to the surveyed market.

The iMyck Price Checker

The local printing market is very fragmented hence prices are widely different from shop to shop. However, with increasing transparency brought about by the Internet, we expect the prices will converge in the future. Printers will find it more difficult to justify prices that are far off from the norm.

Use the iMyck Price Checker to gain a better awareness about what other printers set their retail prices. There are a few things to keep in mind. One is that the app does not have any information on quality or service. Another is that data points at very low or very high quantities do not represent the market well because large sampling error makes them statistically less meaningful.

To help make this tool more useful in the future, please send us comments and feedback. If there is any website you wish to have prices included in the analysis, please contact us and specify on the subject line : To be included in the price survey.

Happy Printing!

So Much Time, So Little Fun?

Over the weekend I looked up jokes about printers and the printing industry and found so little. Personally, I did not know many jokes before, but the results after so many searches on Google left me pretty disappointed. I mean, really, printers have been around since, eh, the tenth or fifteenth century depending on how you define printers (the human kind). And in all this time, people didn't make fun of us as much as they did of Bush or Obama in less than ten minutes? Granted, we are not as sexy or outrageous as the politicians, but come on, there must be funny happenings somewhere sometimes in a printing place.

So here is my challenge to all fellow printers (offset, digital, screen, or otherwise) to collect, invent, expand or modify jokes about us, our tools and our trade - after reading the below list of jokes I have collected thus far. Some does not directly involve a printer, only in relative connection.

The List - what I have found.

Why did you decide to work in prepress? “I got into prepress because I heard of the strippers.”

Why do people start working in prepress?  “I got into prepress because I had heard that they could always use dingbats and dummies and creeps in the gutter…”

What type of hunting do printers prefer? Trapping.

Has anyone else ever had a client choose a paper stock and helpfully fax you a sample?

Printers Law: You will misspell the name of the client's spouse.

The customer is always right . And an idiot.

"Suppose we refund all your money, re-print the job without charge, close the business down and hang the pressman; would that be satisfactory?"

One font meets the other in Rome. He asks: “Hey, are you a Roman too?”

“No,” says the other, “but I am an Italic!”

Who printed the Kmart ad that had ‘flannel shits’ on sale?

Graphic Design Law: The best designs never survive contact with the client.

A single picture tells more than a thousand words. A technical picture has more than thousand bugs.

A single picture has more bugs than be described with thousand words.

Want to holiday in Lake Tahoe? Their brochure tells you to visit www.gotahoe.com.

Think the dude at your graphic department is brain dead? Meet the guy at www.speedofart.com.

Graphic Design Law: If two designs are shown, a third will be requested. If provided, then one of the first two will be chosen.

New girl from the client to estimate dept: "Why is your film cost so high? I could buy it a lot cheaper at the local photographic shop!"

St. Peter met a guy standing at Heaven's gate. He said “I must check your record. Please stand here and wait”. “I see that you drank alcohol and smoked a smoke or two. Fact is, you’ve done everything a good person should never do. We can’t have folks like you up here! Your life was full of sin.” Then he read the last record, took the guy's hand and said “Come in”. He led him up to the big boss and said “Take him in and treat him well. He used to work in Printing. He’s already done his time in Hell.”

Why did the printer forget to say goodbye to his wife? He was pressed for time.


What did the typographer say to the printer who wouldn’t stop talking? “Get to the point.”

Client: "I need price for a 2 color job... black and white”.

The “designer” stored all images in a myriad of arcane directories. So… get this, to make it easy… they searched for all jpg, gif, tif, eps files on their hard drive and copied them all to a CD and sent them to me (so we could relink the graphics). And, from a quick look at the contents of that disk, it was obvious that the 'designer" had browsed certain forbidden part the web extensively.

Printers know how to ‘do it’ between the sheets.

Designer: ”Can you give me a list of printing companies you have a relationship with so I can get an estimate?”
Client: ”No, sorry. We owe them a bunch of money.”


Akpos came first in the class because his teacher get their papers printed from Akpos uncle's printing press.

Teacher: "Children, exams are near, if you have any question you can ask me."

Student: "In which printing shop the question papers are printed?"

“Did you hear? Comma and Period got married.”

“Really? Comma’s a great guy, but who’s Period?”

“Some moody chick he picked up at the Crossbar a year ago.”

“I bet she’s perfect for him.”

“Yep, she’s always finishing his sentences.”

That's about it. If you know of any other printer (the human kind) jokes I'd like you to send it to me via the comment below so I can share them on the net.

Update - Contribution from readers

Printers do it and leave a lasting impression.

Printers do it without wrinkling the sheets.

Printers do it in the dark.

A client came in with a stack of red paper and a CD containing a white on red background artwork. I could tell her suspicious look when I explained it would be better to print red in on white paper, not the other way round.

While working with a client on an artwork for a well known drinks brand, I had the challenge of trying to make their brand orange colour out of CMYK. As it was an advert insert there was no option of using a spot colour. Obviously it was a bit muddy and not very vibrant but I was happy that it was the best of a bad situation. Client wasnt and wanted to change it. 
Client: "Can we add more yellow?" 
Me: "The colour has 100% yellow in it." 
Client: "But its not orange enough, can we make it more orange?" 
Me: "We can only use yellow and magenta to make the orange" 
Client: "Ok, can we add more magenta?" 
Me: "We could but the colour will be too red." 
Client: "Ok, then can we add more yellow aswell to balance it?" 
Me: "the colour already has 100% yellow, we cant add any more." 
Client: "Why not, we need to add more yellow!" 
Me: "But we already have 100% yellow." 
Client:"Ok, but can we make it more orange?" 

Client to prepress: "Can you turn the picture around so we can see the back of the product?" 

Expert author calls in with super, super rush job. The subject - How to avoid last minute jobs!


Charles at iMyck.com