Why Rush Fees are most often unnecessary and/or dishonest…
Many label printing companies offer an option known as “rush fees” to get an order produced and shipped earlier than would normally be the case. At Wizard Labels, we do not offer such an option, and here’s why:
1. At Wizard Labels we believe that the fairest, most honest, and most efficient way to deal with order flow is “first in, first out”. If we provided customers a way to jump the queue, that would introduce constant confusion in the production schedule – which is a multi-step process to get an order through the plant and shipped to you. It’s not as simple as moving one job aside to get a rush order produced – it slows the entire workload down while other orders in various stages of production are shuffled around to expedite the rush order.
2. Here’s a hypothetical scenario to illustrate our point. Let’s assume the plant has 50 orders in the schedule that are due to ship today. If a customer in a hurry is prepared to pay a rush fee, suddenly the whole schedule is put at risk. Depending on how large the rush order is, at least one (and possible many) other orders may get pushed back a day – and those customers who have waited patiently for their product labels are disenfranchised and left wondering why their ship date was missed. How would you feel if your order was one of those?
3. Companies who do offer a rush option often charge many hundreds of dollars for the privilege, regardless of whether their production schedule would have allowed an early shipment anyway (without affecting any other orders). In other words, a polite request for a fast turn could possibly have been satisfied at no cost to the customer, but the rush fee is charged anyway. Where is the honesty and integrity in such an approach?
4. Possibly the most compelling reason that we at Wizard Labels don’t provide a rush option is also the simplest – i.e. there’s very little practical benefit in doing so. Why? – because our standard production time is only 2 working days from proof approval, so the most that could be achieved by rushing an order would be a single day less in production.
That said, we do understand that some circumstances can arise where a customer simply needs their product labels “yesterday”, and even a single day is important. In many cases, we could achieve the same result by simply upgrading your shipping method to overnight – which leaves the production schedule intact and allows all customers to receive the fast service they deserve. By the way, upgrading to overnight shipping from our standard free 2-Day shipping would probably be a lot cheaper than the typical rush charge as well – what we like to call a “win-win”.
In summary, at Wizard Labels we believe that good service is best achieved when it’s applied evenly across all customers, not just those prepared to pay a premium – particularly when the extra cost is often unnecessary or unproductive. If you’re in a hurry, by all means reach out to us and we’ll look for ways to get your custom product labels to you as quickly as we can – but we will not sacrifice other customers’ orders to do so.
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