Business: Hi-Land Printers
Owner: John McDowell, 62, of Pomona, Galloway Township
Location: 34 Old Turnpike, Pleasantville
Started: 1972
Employees: One
Phone: 609-646-6319
Hi-Land Printers does all types of commercial printing. We have a lot of foot traffic, doing copies, fax service.
We’re also a union printer, the oldest union printer in Atlantic County. We belong to the typographical union, so we do union work. Unions in the area that require union printers will bring work to us.
We do all types of commercial printing for everybody. We do letterheads, envelopes, business cards, forms, just about anything you can think of.
My father, Raymond, who founded the business, used to say we print everything but money.
We have a large clientele now in the community’s Spanish residents and other Pleasantville residents.
We moved here from our first location at 113 North Main and then 121 South Main, and then we wound up here. On Main Street we had no parking, so this is better, with ample parking.
The only problem in our history has been the downturn in the economy since the recession, just like everybody else. Things aren’t what they used to be. Nobody has any extra money to spend.
We’re just trying to keep the pricing down to get by the best we can, which is hard to do.
I’ve been doing this since 1980. This is all I know. My father taught me when I started with him. I don’t know that I could work for anyone, having worked for myself for so long.
It’s been good and I’ve raised a family of five kids, but I haven’t gotten rich.
The biggest challenge is trying to hold down pricing, with the cost of paper and such going up all the time.
Ink used to be a big expense, but now we have digital technology and that reduces ink usage.
The transition to digital was good. It was expensive in the beginning for a small business, and then you have to upgrade every five years. But it was definitely worth it and that’s the future of printing.
Future plans: We just put a new digital machine in about three months ago, which can handle more volume and larger sheet sizes.
