A story of dissatisfaction with a Staples printing department:

We received a call from a rather flustered client who (despite our recommendations) had taken their brand new business card artwork to the local Staples store to be printed. A couple of hours later, our client takes a phone call from the Staples service department - not to tell her that everything was ready for pick up - but rather, to tell her that the business cards were ‘blurry’, and that the file setups were ‘horrible’. Needless to say, our client was none too happy, figuring that our logo designers has sent her crappy files and business card setups. Sigh. As we’ve been doing since day one, we set up all our business card artwork as print ready impositions, in .eps and .pdf formats, in CMYK Four Color Process or PANTONE Spot Color formats depending on the color palette (see our logo file formats guide for more). Hasn’t ever been a problem. Shouldn’t be a problem now. I advised the client to calm down, and offered to speak with the kind people at Staples to see what’s what.

Lesson learned: bring your business printing needs to a professional print shop.

Even though Staples is equipped with millions of dollars in digital printing technology from EFI and Xerox; Staples still can't offer the a level of service required to produce business cards - one of the simplest of printed business products.