This company send me a simple 4/4 color print job of 1000 11x17' brochures that was missing magenta ink. CMYK printing requires all 4 colors, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. If one of those colors fails to print, the job is going to be seriously off color.

I notified them of the bad job, and instead of going back to a print sample, they wanted me to send them samples of the job they'd shipped me. I asked them to pay for the return shipping, assuming that they'd see the lousy job they did and reprint it properly. Instead I got an argument, a refusal to pay the shipping charges and later, an accusation that I didn't know what I was talking about because there's a difference between RGB color space and CMYK color space--that they'd actually found a copy of the print job and deemed it was within standard printing industry variance of 20%. (Industry standard is 10%.)

Then they told me they couldn't/wouldn't do anything about the lousy job unless I sent the whole thing back. So I did. After reporting them to my CC company and also to the BBB, they did refund my money, but not the shipping charges I incurred to send all their brochures back. They said, after sending an email stating that they would refund only if I sent the stuff back, that they wouldn't refund the shipping charges because I sent the stuff back 'at my own discretion.'

Is it possible that this company is so incompetent they can't even recognize when there is something radically wrong with their process? And they expect the customer to take responsibility for their mistakes.