A Tale of Two Printers

I've encountered two package printer stories of late which oppose each other but I surmise are typical of the state of things for package printers right now in this economy. Printer A recently added a digital press to its arsenal to address customer demands. I approached this printer to see if it would be interested in participating in our March digital printing feature. I wanted to profile the printer and talk about its successes, particularly in the digital printing arena. Phone calls and emails were exchanged, the deadline for response came and went. Finally I gave the printer a call to see if something was wrong with the questions I sent or to see if my contact there required more time. It turns out, the printer was struggling with reconciling the idea of championing digital printing and its successes with it with the reality that economic conditions called for recent staff layoffs. In the end, we both agreed it would be better to wait until we cover digital again to proceed with our profile. The idea was that hopefully by that time the economy would improve and the laid off employees would be back to work.