Today I had to photocopy a lot of documents and at 5 cents a page it came out to over $40. I was actually with another person as well and for some reason he decided to ask the store clerk why it wasn’t 3 cents a copy instead as it seems like he was trying to drive the price down for me. His thought was that you can buy hundreds of paper for like a few dollars and so it shouldn’t cost that much.
It was an individually owned shop as the person running the photocopier happened to own the business. He first mentioned that he needs to make a living and light heartedly mentioned how he had to give 1 cent to the photocopy people and about another for the paper and toner. Therefore, if he charged 3 cent he mentioned that his profit would only be 1 cent.
The person I was with still didn’t really buy that though and even on the way out he thought it was highway robbery to pay over $40 for that. It was kind of funny though. While there probably would have been cheaper places, I was in a semi-rush unfortunately and at the same time I always look at things from the businesses perspective too.
Otherwise that’s like me saying how expensive can it really be for say a person to tutor you to learn something as all they are doing is talking right? In general though, I think from a business end a 30% profit margin is usually reasonable. Of course you can’t really use that for everything, but that is the figure that I am personally contempt with when I’m the consumer.