For Customers

Way back in my teenage years, I worked part-time at a take-out pizza store. Customers would sometimes say, “Give me a large pizza with everything on it.”

When I’d reply, “Okay, that’ll be $26.00” (or whatever the price was), the customer would gasp and quickly change to, “Just make it pepperoni and mushrooms.”

Wants and needs can be quite different when a price tag is attached.

What do you need?

A corporate photography customer recently asked for some photos of their Toronto office. The pictures were to be used on their web site and printed in a brochure. The company sent a list describing the ten pictures they wanted.

I sent a quote for about $2,800.

The customer e-mailed back and was quite shocked at the price. Why is it so expensive?
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Before a company tries to save a few dollars on its corporate photography by buying cheap stock pictures or by hiring the lowest-priced commercial photographer, that business should remember this:

There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little more cheaply. The people who consider price alone are that person’s lawful prey.

It is unwise to pay too much but it is worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money, that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do.

The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot. It cannot be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run. And if you do that, you will have enough to pay for something better.

– often attributed to 19th-century social critic John Ruskin, an advocate for economic reform and social change.