Printing versus D.I.Y.

Economic Times are tough all over. Pennies have to be watched, belts have to be tightened, basically everything needs some attention.

Paper is a good opportunity to save money. Print everything two sided and reduce the amount of paper you use. This is just a good idea anyway, reduce the amount of physical space your archives will consume, lighten the load when moving those archives, both of which reduce the total carbon footprint of your operations.

However,the actual money savings are slight when you figure the cost of a sheet of paper is somewhere around a penny. It takes a lot of pennies to make a difference. So if your printing two sides to save money immediately, you aren't really saving any money immediately. You should keep saving those pennies, but with the understanding that they are only pennies.

Let me give you another example of a money saving idea that doesn't really save any money: Envelopes.

Envelopes should be the easiest thing in the world, order a rubber stamp or print some labels, stamp or stick, and away you go! Easy as pie!

But did you save any money?

A box of envelopes from the local office supply is about $9. And that is for the most basic of envelopes.

If you want to go with a rubber stamp, you can get an a typical address stamp for about $15. And a stamp at that price point should last you between 3 and 5 thousand impressions.

Now, how fast can you stamp a box of 500 envelopes? And what is that time worth to you? What could you be doing, what should you be doing, instead of stamping a box of 500 envelopes?

Keeping up with me so far? Your envelopes have cost roughly $19 a box if you count two cents per stamp to cover your time and the initial cost of the stamp.


Oh, there is a quality issue as well. Your $15 dollar rubber stamp is going to print kind of like this:

And the longer you use the stamp, the more it will fade and then you start hitting it harder which shortens the life span even further..... you get the idea.

That life span of the rubber stamp I mentioned above, between three and five thousand impressions, a case of envelopes is 2,500, or five boxes of 500. That means you will be lucky to get two cases of envelopes stamped from one rubber stamp. How many boxes of envelopes do you use in a year?

The alternative?

The Copy Center!

This is our blog, did you not see that one coming?

Envelopes can be printed for $25 per box, or if you have room to store them you can get a case for $100, or $20 per box.

And we have specialized machines for envelopes that can print as many as 2,500 envelopes an hour. That is a case of envelopes in an hour. And all it takes you is the time to send us a work order. A few minutes of your valuable time and you get a professional presentation that looks something like this:

Clean, neat, professional looking, everything an envelope from the City of Hollywood should be.

Lets recap:

Crappy rubber stamp impression on an envelope - $19 ish dollars for a box.

Professionally printed envelopes from the Copy Center - as low as $20 per box.

Any questions?