Wednesday, March 01, 2006

You get what you pay for...

I've found myself getting annoyed with the customers again. Once again it's only certain kinds of customers. Now I realize that, yes I do work in customer service and I'm supposed to deal with these people. But increasingly there is a type that has been coming around a lot lately. The kind that want a really, really well designed product yet do not want to pay the price of a well designed product. There is some truth to the maxim "you get what you pay for".

Where I work we charge by the hour for design. We call it computer time and bill it in fifteen minute increments. We have one customer in particular that seems to have a serious problem with this. So much so that there is a standing order that she has to sign for pricing before we even touch a job of hers. At some point last week she waddled in (and everyone scurried, leaving me stuck with her) with scraps of newspaper that she wanted us to do something with. But she didn't want to pay much. Truth be told she probably didn't want to pay at all. So we did what she asked in the amount of time she wanted us to spend on it. It looked horrible. Really bad. But she still didn't want to pay us to make it look better which we could have done for just some more time and money.

The moral? There really isn't one. Other than some people need to realize that computers aren't magical and it does take time to create a decent product. And money.

2 comments:

JackassJimmy said...

Hey man,

I just wanted you to know I haven't deserted you. I have been following all of your adventures and congrats on the impending cohabition.

Things here between snow, and rehab and trying to make a dollar outta 15 cents have been keeping a brother busy.

Hope all is well.

Cheers,
JJ

Rob said...

I used to work at Kinkos for a while... I always hated it when people brought crap in for us to do because we'd do it just like they wanted, it'd look like crap and then when people asked him where he got it done, he'd say we did it... So we produced crap.