Cup-a-Joe

This past week has reminded me why too much government and large bureaucracies can be bad.  The Texas Comptroller has recently taken a position on the state’s relatively new Franchise Tax law (it’s really a gross margin tax) which could be extremely detrimental to our industry.  For the sake of brevity, I’ll spare you the details, but the net affect could be a 1% tax on postage – paid by the mail service provider.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, it was brought to my attention that the folks at FSC are going to require that anyone adopting the FSC Chain of Custody standard, as of 2012, must declare that the firm is not directly or indirectly in violation of the ILO Core Conventions (among other things).  In a nutshell, companies will have to state their support of collective bargaining.  Hmmmm.  Does anyone live in the real world any more?  Maybe  it’s time to call it a week and go home.  Say good night Gracie.

These past few weeks have been awful quiet in regards to the print industry.  We continue to watch the economic fist-fight between President Obama and the Republicans and wait to see the results.  The Libyan mess has been relegated to the back pages – but the instability this has created in the Middle East is being reflected in oil prices.  Not a good thing for the economy, or our industry.

I’ve been reading a variety of blogs and articles on print and its “changes,” and continue to see a diversity of opinions.  One group will say – “the industry is not going away,” while another is saying “the sky is falling.”  Hmmm.  Maybe we can all agree that the next few years are going to be “different.”

The SFI/FSC fight of who’s holier-than-thou is filling up the blog pages and there still continues to be cynicism on producers and consumers on the whole issue.  Yet, one thing we should not overlook is that companies which have solid sustainability practices (this means a lot more than “being green”) have found ways to reduce their costs of operation by minimizing waste, in materials and production – and that’s a good thing.

I see that USPS has put IMb on the back burner — again.  Still too much confusion – and Postmaster Donahoe has bigger fish to fry.

Oh, baseball fans, note that the Texas Rangers are 8-1.  Not a bad way to start the season!

I was having a brief conversation with a friend of mine.  He is a semi-retired banker with an expertise in small business and some history with printers.  He made an observation which I found interesting.  “No one is printing any more catalogs, brochures, annual reports.”  He noted that he no longer sees car companies producing brochures, he’s receiving electronic annual reports, and he no longer gets a Sears or JC Penney catalog.  Ergo print is dead.

Yet, if we look around as I observed in my last blog, print is still everywhere.  It’s just being produced differently and through different channels, but he does not know that!  Our biggest challenge as an industry is demonstrating our viability as an effective mass communication solution.  We no longer compete with other printers – but with other media and changing perceptions.  PIA Southern California’s most recent campaign, “Choose Print,” targets that challenge.

As I explained to my friend, print is still a very viable tool – but it’s just produced differently (on demand and short run print) requiring different equipment/technologies and there are still opportunities.  And that brings up another point.  If you’re not talking to your banker about your company’s viability and that print is not dead, you will face serious financing challenges when that time comes.

Just finished meeting with our Clean Air Committee to discuss the upcoming regulations which impact our industry in Dallas/Fort Worth and Houston next year.  The industry if facing some significant changes next year and I’m always amazed how much willingness there is for the industry to try to do the right thing.  The challenge is trying to get the regulators to understand that documentation for documentation’s sake is not the solution.

Our biggest issue is not the requirements to use chemistry that helps reduce ozone — which has a dramatic impact on a company’s productivity/profitability.  It’s the regulatory hoops which must be jumped so the regulating community can “document” that the “rules” were followed.   It’s one of the major frustrations between the regulated community and the regulators.  If it’s not documented, it didn’t happen.  Yet, if one makes the rules so onerous — businesses are less willing to comply.  It’s a fine balancing act.  It’s also an argument at the heart of the recent litigation between Texas and the EPA.  Ah, such a tangled weave.

“The printing industry is the single largest air polluter and the third-largest consumer of fossil fuels in the world after automobiles and steel manufacturing,” stated Re-nourish Founder and University of Illinois Design Professor Eric Benson. “On a typical day, [printers] use trillions of gallons of water that must be treated for its toxic chemical content and released back into our waterways.”

Meanwhile, adhesives, bindings, and foils used in printing and packaging can render the final product un-recyclable, virtually guaranteeing that it will end up in a landfill. There, petroleum-based inks can cause lasting damage to the environment, leaching volatile organic compounds (VOCs) which can cause cancer and birth defects into the ground, contaminating soil, groundwater, and, upon evaporation, the air.”

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