Comments on: Kinko’s Employees

By: NYCKinko's Girl

NYCKinko's Girl — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 02:22:19 +0000

I have noticed that alot of customers do not appreciate Kinko’s at all…yet keep coming.I had a customer tell me that Kinko’s only hired high school drop outs and minorities. Honestly all i could do is smile and say, “you have a nice day now”. We are underpayed ofcourse but think about it this way. We get payed (for example) 12 dollars per hour to press the start button on a printer, do to the lack of knowledge, and lazyness from these “high class”, degree holders, company CEO’s etc.

By: Team Member

Team Member — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 23:34:44 +0000

Ok, my explaination of the above from experience as an employee. You walk into a Kinkos and you are the only person there. (There are busy periods and there are slow periods so it is quite possible it was extremely busy just before you got there. It is also quite probable that there was no counter person on duty - just a manager and a subordinate doing production and counter. Mind you, 2 people is very understaffed for the huge volume of work Kinkos employees are expected to produce. They were both probably in the middle of sorting out complicated orders on the computer and that is very hard to do with constant interuptions. I have a similar attitude sometimes when I have to do counter because the more I do counter the less production I can do and since production is my job and counter is not I am held responsible when jobs are late - not when customers are impatient. But many times there isnt a designated counter person. Him staring at the screen for 3 minutes is easy to explain. It takes about 3 minutes for our old computers to open a cd. His attitude to you is inexcusable however. He should not have been rude to you and he definately should have initiated the conversation - but maybe he was just burnt out from the job. Or maybe he really had no idea what he was doing - the company does tend to hire people who have no computer skills or common sense from time to time. But by no means is the job easy - you need very good computer skills to do this job and you need to be able to multitask to the max! You also need to have very good problem solving abilities because customers come in with all kinds of crazy requests and we have to fulfill them all. We are not all idiots.

By: Sammy

Sammy — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 07:36:48 +0000

1 Kinkoid, 1Costcoid and 1OfficeMaxoid were hired by an owner of a print and design firm in Seattle, WA. The owner pad $600 each for them to take classes for design applications with Adobe and trained each individual how to pre-flight, mount, finish, cut, drill, bind etc. They have landed some major accounts and still provide excellent service everyday. The owner pays them minimum wage, $8.07. Those guys are very very very knowledgeable and have been known to save customers time and money on projects. fedexkinko has forgotten that, customers make the business. The shop is called Pacific Highway Print and Design. Located in Federal Way, WA

By: kinkoid

kinkoid — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 07:03:59 +0000

i make 11 - 12 an hour at kinkos i have been there four and a half years an i have to say i give some of the best customer service to all my customers that come in. now im not saying i love to do it but i sure get paid a good amount to do it. and ill do it. and ill admit i have some days where its like “sigh” another customer with the same thing again just like everyday.

one thing that i can determine from this story is you say he puts the cd in and stared at it for a good while …

i know that when i get a customer with a cd and i place it in the computer our computers take a good minute or so just to recognize the cd and then it lets me click the cd drive to open it and view the contents of the file.

second thing i see in the story that i always have an issue with is, you said you walked in and told the kinkoid exactly what you wanted and in the end he either didn’t listen or forgot. for all you know he was balancing three other costumers in his head before you walked in. we receive orders threw email, and internet site all the time. not to mention what orders were already tooke for the day that we have to work on and process. sorry if we don’t catch it the first time but i always tell a customer let me take a look at the files first before we determine what needs to be done because you said you had six files for all he knows its six twenty page files … and he has to consider binding or slip sheet options.

ill agree with you that he should have communicated better but when i started retail i was quiet shy and didn’t know much of what the customer wanted to hear … it sounds like perhaps something else occurred in your day to set your mood before you walked in but you needed someone to blame or direct your frustrations to. i get that all the time too.

By: ss

ss — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 03:08:53 +0000

I see a lot of customers coming in with there fancy iPhone but they don’t know how to do a fax or make copies. I find that very amusing.

By: Hardcopy

Hardcopy — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 23:44:14 +0000

There isn’t any training on Illustrator, photoshop, indesign, word, excel, powerpoint, visio, autocad, acrobat, so how is a new employee suppose to know more than a designer coming in to print off a poster for an interview? Those online courses have been deleted from the online training and replaced with Office Tiger.

By: usa5501

usa5501 — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:20:05 +0000

I worked at kinko’s for 7 years, and the second fedex took over they went down hill. First thing they did was give everyone a major pay cut, and tell us that they had to because fed ex had to be reimbursed for buying Kinkos. Then moral went down, seasoned employees quit and were replaced by 8:00 an hour part time employees, known as greeters, that were- to be polite- englishly challenged. For some strange reason, even though the new employees were absolutly no replacement for the seasoned employees that left, the customers expected the same level of service. When they did not receive it, they treated the employees like garbage…

I would conservatively say that 10% of the people hired would not make it through their first week.

And then they would give the employees that were at the top of their pay level nickle and dime wage increases. Litterally.

To be a good kinko’s employee you have to know more then the customer knows about what ever program they are using.
Illustrator, photoshop, indesign, word, excel, powerpoint, visio, autocad, acrobat….Do you know all of these programs? Then you wouldn’t make a good employee,,,

They also need to understand basic networking, and machine maintenance. Everything is digital, and if a press and a computer aren’t communicating your job isn’t printed.

And the finishing, binding, drilling, cutting, mounting…

but you can’t find people that have that skill set and pay them a wage of 11.00 to 12.00 per hour.

So you get what you get.

By: Signs Guy

Signs Guy — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 02:39:47 +0000

I started at Kinko’s on 2004 and I am still there right now, though I was lucky enough to have my own department which does solely signs and banners, but I feel the pain that customers have to put up with and the Kinko’s employee has to deal with every single day.

To people who are customers, we are trying our best to help you all out, but this is Kinko’s not McDonald. It’s not as easy as ordering supersized number one or a happy meal with extra fries. 80% of our jobs are custom jobs and the company do not train us on that sort of things. We are on our own. They just provide us the tools to help our customers. So please be patient and help us help you! Also please consider this that we are not just a printing shop, we does packing, shipping both local and international, FedEx package trackings, we handles faxes, signs and displays, office supplies, computer consulting, graphic designing, email service, customer/phone consulting, and alot more but the company pays us very little to do all that. It seems like a dead-end job but we work there because it’s stable and still pays higher than other retail stores.

Customers probably wonder why don’t we hire more employees? Back in the day when an employee gives two weeks notice, the company would hire a new replacement person during that the two week, but that’s not how it works at Kinkos. It could take a month or two before we can hire an employee. We have to go through background check, drug test, personality test, and finally training which would take almost a month to complete. So our job is not simple as standing all day and press the green button at the copy manchine.

If you think our job is easy, think again. We have to always be on our feet and our minds have to be sharp and pay attention to every single copy. When there is something wrong with the customer files, we try our best to fix it, and I know almost always, we fixed them behind your back and we don’t even charge customers for it. So if you have a tiff file that is 1200dpi and all you wanted was 8.5×11 and our printer only prints 600dpi max. You are actually making our job alot harder. One, it takes about 10-15 mins to spool a 200+mb file to our print server. Two, it takes another 5-10 mins for the printer to process the file and finally print it. Three, big files on the CD takes very long time to open. Four, three files on the CD + spooling and printing time = hella long.

Please understand, I’m not bashing customers. I’m just showing you (customers) how things work. Things that customer don’t see before we can bring the your prints over to you.

By: FedEX

FedEX — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 02:52:39 +0000

I m on my 6 month at fedex kinkos and still not sure how to to alot of things but I do my best. I believe that people should be more appreciative for what others are doing for them. Cause i sure everyone at one time or another has no clue what they are doing. Not to make excusses just realize you as a customer are not the only person that needs help. And for the record we are suppose to repeat what you want us to do so that it is done correctly so repeating info is policy.

By: Hardcopy

Hardcopy — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 03:53:38 +0000

I just resigned from Fedexkinko’s. Currently, I am enrolling in college full time. I agree with what Jimmy Dean says, but I don’t really blame the customers for the work environment at Kinko’s. Lets face it, most Kinko’s stores are way understaffed for the level of customer intervention which is required to serve the customers. Basically, each employee could spend a minimum of 10 minutes for each customer that enters the store. The stores are not adequately staffed to handle the volume of customers of a major hub. And look at the employee turnover rate? From most of the customer complaints that I have read, I have to wonder how long that employee has been at Kinko’s? I bet a lot of the confused employees are guys and gals who have been at the store less than six months and haven’t been adequately trained on pre-flight, otp, or on the copy business in general.

After reviewing my 2.5 years at Kinko’s, I see lack of proper training and poor scheduling for employees as the two major issues that causes poor employee moral. I am sure that all stores are different, but I worked at three separate stores and found the same complaints in each store.