Review: FedEx Kinko's

Can't leave a good thing well enough alone, can you FedEx? Kinko's is the premiere copy and office-supplies-away-from-your-office store. Or at least it was.

My wife is graduating this May and she wanted graduation announcements printed up a little bit nicer than our clunkly, broken inkjet could do it, so... we whipped up a formal looking design in Microsoft Word, and I, being somewhat techo-savvy kinda guy, saved it as a PDF and threw it on a USB drive to take to Kinko's.

First Visit: Aubrey and I walked into the store and there were two associates and two customers. They all had their heads down looking at, what I assume to be, product designs for Kinko's to print. Okay, we'll wait for someone to get done, I guess. A minute goes by, and we haven't been greeted. Two minutes goes by and no one has looked up. As an aside, I once was an associate for a certain Shack that sells Radios, and we were ALWAYS to greet the customer within 90 seconds of them entering the store. Well, 5 minutes rolls around and Aubrey and I are getting tired of standing around like bumps on the log. Did we leave? No. We looked around at some of the merchandise, card stock, picture frames, sniffed rubber cement, whatever. And then...one of the customers is done!! Before we could close in on the associate, he makes a beeline to the back of the store! And STAYS there for at least the next 5 minutes before we left. Yah...15 minutes of merely existing in the store and no hello or anything. So we left.

Second Visit: Being as how we needed the announcements made pretty quick, we persisted in choosing FedEx Kinko's for our copy needs. An associate actually greets us this time and we explain what we want. A simple card style grad announcement made from a PDF that I have ALREADY CREATED. The response was "Sir, we can't do PDFs". My jaw had to have hit the floor. The PDF is the de facto standard of digital typesetting! We were told that it had to be Microsoft Office Word format. We left, frustrated.

Third Visit: Color us stupid, but yes, we went back, MS Word format in hand. They finally agreed to print up what I made. The first draft was off center and crooked as it sat on the paper. I showed them these obvious flaws and with a grunt, the associate set off again to fix it. I was a stickler about it and finally got the draft I liked and ordered the set. They tried to pull "All these drafts are going to be extra" on us. We called them on that one, saying the drafts should be part of the customer satisfaction. Anyway, we got the prints that night at 10:30pm when they closed. For some reason they could shoot out 5 draft sheets in 15 minutes, but it took 4 hours to do our 20 copies.

My take? They should re-name FedEx Kinko's to Barnum and Bailey's Kinko's.

RATING: *