Business ProfileforAlpha Graphics

My experience with this franchise with them has been one marked by consistently poor communications and general dismissal of my print quality concerns. This entire drama went from mid-May 2022 to early July 2022. After submitting a request for quote, it took a few days for Alphagraphics to respond. After finally receiving the quote, I emailed an affirmative response to proceed. A couple of weeks passed and I finally received the order. The covers of almost every magazine had striping in the ink; a quality issue that typically suggests low toner or mismatched paper setting. The main explanation finally given to me by the printer was: “We have to use what's available, unfortunately we may have to use an offset sheet instead of a digital sheet to meet the customer delivery. Offset sheets do not treat toner like digital sheets. Digital sheets are produced to lay the toner down evenly, like offset is designed to absorb ink.” If the franchisee was aware of this paper supply and print quality issue, they should have told me beforehand and given me options for how to proceed. Instead, they sent the shipment—which they knew to have issues—and likely hoped that we wouldn’t notice. After much prodding and emails, the owner finally contacted me and said I could pull out the erroneous issues. Though they qualified this with the caveat: “We will be willing to reprint those books that are defective up to a point. First we have to determine the quantity and then a subjective quality standard.” In other words, they were going to scrutinize our own scrutiny before actually proceeding with any reprints. Alternately, they said they would give a full refund if we shipped back all of the issues to them—at our own expense. They also apparently sent us 107 issues (we only ordered 100), and would only give a refund if all 107 issues were returned. Based on the printer’s unreliability and the myriad reasons they’ve given me to not trust them, we counted this project as a loss.