Over 10 years at Kinko's/FedEx Office - Anonymous employee FedEx Office Employee Review

FedEx is one of the most respected companies and brands in the world, however, they have no idea how Office fits into their company. There is no mission statement for FedEx Office other than the unofficial motto of "cost cutting" and "save money." Micro-management from the very top levels of the company (area vice-presidents and regional directors) is heavy handed and the prevalent method of how to do business, from which paper trays to use and which printer drivers to use to produce customer projects, is driven by people who have no idea how to make the products team members are asked to make daily. These decision makers are more concerned with metrics and measuring how you produce a product and could care less if the customer is satisfied with it. As a team member, you are expected to utilize two different point of sale systems, a preproduction software package, plus all of the native programs customers utilize to create their documents and you are expected to do all of this within a very narrow range of parameters and for $10 an hour. This is a custom manufacturing job shoved inside of a retail environment. It doesn't matter if you put together 35 customer files and produce a $2500 job for the center if you don't sell a product of the month (batteries, screen cleaners, over-priced flash drives, or a ream of paper). The pricing structure is geared to force customers to the front counter for full service help rather than encourage customers to complete the work themselves. Once a customer figures out that it is cheaper for them to have a team member complete the work for them they naturally utilize full-service printing. $.11-.&.22 per print versus $.49 for self-serve prints drives customers to the front counter and when you can't sell them a $3.99 ream of paper you are punished with a performance counseling session. Never-mind the fact that as a team member, you are dealing with shipping and packing boxes, checking the store e-mail, producing customer jobs on a variety of printers and auxiliary machines, producing e-commerce jobs, answering the phones, and helping customers fax, if you don't force the product of the month on customers, you are a bad team member.