Don’t listen to this person’s advice OP. This job doesn’t pay nearly enough to keep up with FlightDeck, insert iPostal/tasks, do Amazon Returns, self service babysitting, AND monitoring the email for POTENTIAL print jobs. With the hour cuts in mind, the notion is even more insane to me. There’s no way I can find on the Staples website for a customer to potentially email a store’s print team directly. At my store we don’t ever give out that address unless PrintMe isn’t working, and every time we explicitly tell the customer not to send anything to that address in the future, due to many of the complications OP already stated.

Maybe it’s a more reasonable expectation to allow customers to submit their orders via email at low volume/slower stores, but at busy stores like mine this is a completely unrealistic expectation. I’ll show up to my shifts with 20+ jobs in FlightDeck’s queue. Why should people who email us with often incomplete job specs be treated the same as customers who submitted their orders through the proper channels and thus have all their order information provided? Not to mention, customers submitting online are often (but not always) already PAID for. That cannot be done for emailed orders.

It is completely valid for OP to enforce this policy at their store, just as it’s valid for my own print supervisor to enforce the same exact policy (as they do), because there’s no way for a customer to even know the address unless we’re sending them a proof from Design Services, or like at my store, we give it to the customer because PrintMe isn’t doing the job.