Dickeson--Don't Play "Printers' Roulette"

The latter is the usual pricing strategy—perhaps the prevailing strategy in the industry. It is "Printers' Roulette."

The cost-markup strategy explains why PIA ratio studies consistently report average net profit levels for printers at below 4 percent. It is, at the very least, a major reason, if not THE major reason, for unacceptably low returns from printing enterprises. As the saying goes, we spend our time trying to get costs right rather than concentrating on the right thing to be doing—evaluating the benefits to the customer.