Saturday, March 29, 2014

Check printing appears to be a very lucrative business

Well, I say this because I recently had to reorder checks and the cost of my reorder – for 300 pages (of 3 checks on a page) was around $90.00.  A page of three checks, size-wise, is a bit less than an 8 ½ x 11 sheet of paper.  If I subtract the cost of the box and UPS charges, the cost of the checks came to, say, around $80.00.  Divide $80.00 by 300 (sheets), and you arrive at the math that each printed sheet cost approximately $0.267.

Compare that to what you get – per page – for printing a spec book. !!!%#$%&!!!

Deluxe Corporation, I think, is the largest U.S. printer of checks.  Last year (2013) Deluxe (NYSE: DLX) reported sales of $1.584 billion and pre-tax income of $186.65 million, around 11.7% pre-tax.  Not bad, huh.


CEO Lee Schram pulled down a bit more than $3.1 million in compensation last year (per Reuters.com).

1 comment:

  1. Of course, many people (like myself) pay most bills online. I wonder how much the check printing industry has declined over the past several years and where its going.
    On another note, I don't think banks specifically require customers to use a certain company to get checks, but they definitely push one, keeping smaller companies locked out.

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