If you want to sit in a comfortable environment and wait an hour to get something printed, Softwave Gallery is the place. If you’re missing the sarcasm, this is not the place to go, ever. Softwave are good printers, but their Gallery is an abomination.
Softwave Gallery has evolved over the years, first spinning off from the more professional Softwave across the street, then adding a clothes shop and a middling selection of magazines. What hasn’t evolved is the customer service.
When we went they had five workstations, all empty. Literally no one was at work, besides an incompetent accounts girl. That girl was presumably a human calculator, she could offer no information or advice beyond ‘they’re busy’. After waiting for ten minutes someone did come out, but rather than serving us he told us to get a number. Which the accounts girl could have told us 10 minutes earlier. After waiting another 15 minutes for no one to come out, we finally left.
Lest you think this is one bad experience, I have gone to Softwave many times, usually on deadline, and they have always been insanely slow. Places get busy, which is fine, but they also lack the basic customer service of greeting someone and putting them in some sorta queue. It ends up being just a frustrated mess where the customers don’t know what’s going on and the staff doesn’t care.
If you need something printed like a magazine or in numbers, Softwave across the street is actually OK on a corporate level. When it comes to personal customer service, however, Softwave Gallery is entirely useless. We recommend the nearby Anim8 instead. It’s not such a gentrified building, but they will actually print your order in 15 minutes and get you out the door, which is really the point.
