So what the heck is going on with printers these days? Have
you noticed? I can get this great deal on a printer for a
hundred bucks that will do everything but butter my bread. It
copies and faxes and prints photos and scans and even restores
faded pictures. Wow.
But upon further review (thank you NFL instant replay) there
is a catch. It has 6 cartridges. Let me spell that for you:
s-I-x. One cartridge is black ink and the other 5 are shades of
cyan, magenta, yellow, light cyan, light magenta. Wonderful. The
colors are so vibrant and real. The ink lasts for 20 years with
no fading.
Now, for the fine print. The black cartridge cost $17.99 to
replace. The other five cartridges cost $10.00 each. Let me
translate: with tax that’s 70 dollars for the cartridges alone.
Oh, but it gets better. The black ink cartridge holds 16 ml of
fluid. My old printer cartridge holds 23 ml of fluid and only
cost $6.00. The color cartridges are even smaller: 4.5 ml of ink
compared to 11 ml of ink in my old printer cartridge.
So I went into my local office supply store and asked if they
had any of those old printers, you know the ones with the coke
can ink cartridges. I swear I was able to pump almost 20 ml of
black ink into an old cartridge before it started oozing all
over the place and permanently staining the dining room carpet.
I no longer refill my own cartridges. I think you call it
preservation of my marriage.
Nope. The new machines all have smaller cartridges but they
are so much faster and produced better results, according to the
sales guy whose real name I suspect is Pinocchio. And besides,
their store will gladly refill your new cartridges and you’ll be
able to save up to two-dollars per cartridge. Hello! That’s
still 12-dollars for a stinking piece of plastic. Could that be
the reason they’ve moved the ink replacements behind the counter
in a locked area?
Gosh the only liquid substance that gets that kind of
protection is flea control products in the pet store. But that’s
another subject.
By now, the store manager has overheard my musings and he
confirms what we’ve all known for sometime. Print manufacturers
make more profit selling ink cartridges than the printers. He
tells me profit on the cartridges is close to 400 percent while
it’s less than 40 percent on the printers. Those are his figures
not mine. He also tells me it will probably get worse before it
gets better. I hate that phrase. It’s makes me think of traffic
jams.
I jokingly mention the “C” word, conspiracy. When all else
fails and their seems to be no other explanation it is somewhat
satisfying to think you may be the only person in the world to
have seen through the backroom dealings of those crazed
corporate printer company executives.
So imagine my surprise last week when I got this letter from
a law firm out in California informing me of a possible class
action lawsuit against printer manufacturers. Ah, ha! Caught at
their own game. Price fixing the cost of ink. Oh how low can you
go?
Nope, the lawyers are alleging printers are programmed to
indicate your billion dollar cartridges are empty when up to 20-
percent of the ink still remains… 20-percent! And, as I’m sure
you have discovered, some printers won’t let you print anything
when one of your six cartridges starts to “run dry”.
Oh, it is a cruel, cutthroat world we live in. Where have the
days of carbon paper, ditto machines and double prints gone?
Check that… maybe I’ll just cough up the extra bucks and keep my
mouth shut.
