Part of Metal Type’s Printing Advice section here Phil discusses customers.
Customers: yes, the bane of every commercial shop.
The worse by far and away were Architects. Just so ultra fussy and artistic and inventive. I printed for two of them and then threw in the towel. There was no room for me. They wanted to be the designer and type setter and pressman. It just did not work. I had a shouting match with the last architect over the phone and that was that. Nutters all of them.
The best customers that I had were managers of machine shops. They just phoned up and said come on over and get this order for invoices or whatever. They would show me the form and tell me what they paid last time, and did I want the job. And they all paid on delivery or at 30 days. A pleasure to work for such fellows.
Wedding Invitations
Toward the end of my career, I stopped printing wedding invitations. I just could not stand demanding women, telling me that they wanted to have their wedding perfect. The all wanted 1000.00 of service for 100.00 Nuts to that. I would sooner do most anything else. Incidentally, all of my relatives put the arm on me for their wedding invitations. One even told me that I would have had to buy them a gift anyway, so I might as well give them the invites as that gift.
Of all of the wedding invitations for relatives and close friends that I printed and gave away; well I have only ever seen these people at their wedding and never since. Oh, what joy in my life.
I did have a number of high end professionals that I printed for. All of them were easy to work for and it was pleasurable to print on such high end paper.
These professional people were very demanding at the start, but once I was able to find out what they wanted, it was easy. They just repeat ordered till either they or I retired. One very high up physician, ordered a triple batch of stationery when I sent notice that I was retiring. That was very nice.