Unethical Prices & Bad Service - Ultra Supplies at Queensway Shopping Centre

This story was received together with the previous good experience, PC Themes at Sim Lim Square. In this, the result is negative feedback as you will see.

Name : GZ (user chose to use only initials)
Date & Time : June 2006
Place/Website address : Ultra Supplies at Queensway Shopping Centre
Person Serving Me : N/A
What Did I Intend to Buy/What I Bought : Printing services and materials for projects
My Experience : As my courses relates to landscape design, I have a few projects where we need to print out A3 or larger sized drawings for submission of reference. We didn't know where we can find CAD printing shops and after recommendation by our lecturer, we went to Ultra Supplies at Queensway Shopping Centre for our printing needs.

It was located at the top floor of the shopping centre, and our first visit was less pleasant than it would have been. I remember at that time we need to submit an A3 CAD drawing of our project and after stating to them that, they quote us a price of S$12, which is quite expensive. (Editor's note - I remember printing large A0 architectural plans for significantly less but oh well...) I asked them why so expensive since it's only printed in black or white (we were still new to printing big sized drawings) and the worker replied curtly that it's the standard without looking at us. Having no alternative, we had no choice but to pay for the ridiculous pricing, which came up to about $40+ per group due to 3 to 4 sheets of drawings. I thought this would be the end of the unpleasant experience. When I went home and tried to plug in my thumb drive which was used at Ultra Supplies earlier on, I discovered that all my drawings and backup data was gone. Not only that, my thumb drive was infected with virus which proceed to destroy the data on my computer. I was pissed off!

Moving on to Year 2, we had to print our projects again, and I was very unwilling to patronise the store as I didn't have good experience with it. But some groups went to Ultra Supplies to print and they came back with different pricing for the printing, which is weird because we are using standard A3 size and it was in colour, so the pricing should be standard. My team went down to Ultra Supplies as we had no other alternatives and we were once again quoted a ridiculous pricing,(by now we realised that they look at people before quoting their prices).

At which I start to make a ruckus at the place as I feel it's not right to do so. The manager quickly came out from the store and tried to explain to us the pricing, which I saw. Indeed their staff have been charging prices according to their whims. I told the manager about it but he said it's impossible since the pricing is standard(AGAIN SAME BULLSHIT EXCUSE). At that time I was very pissed and intent to make a complain at CASE (Consumers Association of Singapore).

The manager, seeing that the situation is getting bad with the customers at the shop staring at us and the commotion I was making, tried to give us discount for the prints we needed. I accepted and waited calmly for the paper to come out. I would have thought the matter would have died down by then but I get even more pissed when I saw that they tried to scrimp on it by giving us a lower quality colour printing. Another round of commotion and threatening to report to CASE finally got us the project printings at good colour quality, and "discounted" price.

After this incident, I have sworn off this store and would never patronise them EVER. In fact, I make it known to all my course mates so that they would also avoid getting ripped off by them.

The good news is, the printing shop near my house have upgraded their printing services and this includes printing A1 size and colour printing, which fits my project needs perfectly. Not to mention that I had years of dealing with this shop and this upgrade came at a good time for me. The best thing? Inexpensive and good service. Subsequent projects, especially our last Landscape Design projects (which consists of almost more than 20+ CAD drawings) were all printed out from this shop.

Overall Rating : 5 Brickbats (I would add more Brickbats if it allows) Such shops with shoddy dealings should not even exist in the first place.

Editor's note - It's very obvious that bad service travels faster than good service and that people almost always remember bad service as well as good service. Even after 2 years, the memory of bad service remains. The point is, be ethical, be honest and be fair in your dealings with your customers. I have a personal experience with one of these printing shops, something I will post up soon, as the circumstances, although different, showed a lack of ethics and honesty with the company.

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