PRINTING CARTRIDGE RIP OFFS
Humans can be very evil at times. This is one reason why in Canada we have three levels of government; Federal, Provincial and Municipal and each has their own statutes, regulations, policies, procedures and by-laws that we must follow. We are perhaps one of the most highly regulated populations on the face of the planet. And it is all in an attempt to get us to not act in an evil way.
In the case of business you can be honest with your customer and supply a good service for good value or you can rip them off. That is evil takes over and you do something to them that they are usually not aware of that causes you to gain and them to NOT receive a good value. Basically you steal from them. And some very large companies do just that.
At this point you need to have a grasp of the production costs of consumer products. When you look at any consumer product there are several inputs which go to make up the production cost and the retail selling price. A quick and dirty way of obtaining a ball park production cost is simply to cost out the price of the raw materials that went into the product. Because all or most of the product is made by a machine your labor component is normally small. In fact packaging may sometimes cost more than the cost of production for some items. In the case of an ink cartridge there is a small amount of plastic, a very small amount of copper, and some ink which is cheap. There is less than a dollar's worth of material there. Lets be generous and add $2 for the manufacturing process and labor and another dollar for packaging and we really are being generous for a cost at the factory door of no more than $4 Again being generous lets say it costs $1 to ship it to a central warehouse and now lets double our total costs to give the manufacturer some well earned profit. We are at $10 and lets double it again to allow some profit for the retailer. That gives us a retail selling price of $20. But when I went to the Staples to get a replacement ink cartridge for my Sharpe Fax machine the cartridge was pushing $60 or three times the "fair price" So where did the other $40 go? I don't mind paying $20 but I will NOT pay $60 for it. I put it back for some other sucker to buy. Not me.
This is bullshit. For too many years the printer manufacturers have been shaving the margin on printers to get us in their trap so that they could rip us off on the ink cartridges. The worst offenders are HP, Lexmark and Epsom. And Sharpe!
Is there a way to solve this? Yes we could all band together and vow never to spend any more than say $25 for an ink cartridge. If we did that the problem would solve itself in about a week. To my shock I discovered the ink cartridge business is a 21 billion dollar market with 60% or more gross profit margins for manufacturers and that the big printer manufacturers are making 80% of their profit on selling ink NOT printers.
Will it ever happen? Absolutely not. Despite the progress the cartridge refillers have made the printing companies will continue to fleece the public. Now apparently some are building a chip into the cartridge which prevents them from being refilled.
The devil is alive and well and owns a printer company. In fact she owns several. And just in case you might think that you are in the clear because you don't print much -consider how many taxpayer dollars go to the billions spent on printer ink in government and in private business every year and guess who ultimately pays in the form of taxes and higher costs. Yup! (Its YOU)
There are ways to save money on your printing cartridges so stock up on some replacements BEFORE you need them and then need to give your right arm and leg to the local office supply store..
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Please miss devil take me! -back to the index please thankyouverymuch!
24/07/2008