Economics of Printers

[wired]

http://theboard.byu.edu/questions/67747/

One of the writers made the comment that the economics of printers makes no sense. They actually make good sense. It is basically a form of tying where you require people to buy two products together. In order to use the printer, you have to buy an ink cartridge. This allows the.company to price discriminate, a mechanism to make people pay what it is really worth to them. If I want a printer to do casual printing, I won't spend hundreds of dollars for it. But a more active printer would. Instead of making the printer expensive to make a good profit, companies make them cheap. Then they make the ink expensive to get the extra money they could have charged.

As for why color cartridges, last about three prints before giving up the ghost, that's just called being sneak.On my Brother laser printer, I covered the sensor so it would continue to print. Got roughly 400 more pages of printing.

[Laser Jock]

One thing I considered throwing in, but decided wasn't worth it, is that the print cartridges that come with a new printer do not have as much ink as a retail cartridge does. They have quite a bit less, actually. That's why they run out so quickly. (In other words, getting a free cartridge with a new printer, for about the same price as a replacement cartridge, doesn't mean you should just buy a new printer every time you run out of ink.)

[Genuine Article]

(In other words, getting a free cartridge with a new printer, for about the same price as a replacement cartridge, doesn't mean you should just buy a new printer every time you run out of ink.)

This totally happened to me. We were out of ink so my husband went off to buy more, and when he came back he was like "You're going to think I did something really stupid, but don't get mad....I bought a new printer." It was kind of like sending someone off to buy more milk and having them come back with a whole cow. His reasoning was that it was cheaper than getting a new ink cartridge, because in our case they were phasing out the kind that fit our old printer, making them crazy expensive. He also pointed out that the new printer was wireless, so I could print in the living room. I said, "Why would I want to print in the living room?"

Anyway, we now have two printers precisely because of the expensive ink situation.

[Marduk]

This is something that frustrates me to no end. Simply put, pricing metrics are necessarily complicated as a means of trapping consumers. There's really no way to know what the price will be for X number of pages, so there's no real way to adequately account for all the different prices. In fine, just because a printer costs X dollars, it is unknown how much the cartridges will be at any point in the future, how much each cartridge holds, how much of a given ink a printer will use (not all printers put down the same amount of ink onto the page) etc. I find it so frustrating because this is the model that works, and upfront pricing simply does not.

We see this same type of principle at play in just about everything we buy (gas probably being the major exception, and this because it is a very static cost.) People would rather buy a $100 item for 40% off than the same thing that is always $59. (When I say this, I mean that's what ends up getting purchased. People want a discount to drive them into purchasing.) The more complicated the metric, the more people seem to want it. For those of us who would rather have a set price and know what we're going to pay, there really is little alternative.

[Digit]

This is something that frustrates me to no end. Simply put, pricing metrics are necessarily complicated as a means of trapping consumers.

Try not to think of the airline industry, where you might have paid $864 for your ticket and the guy in the seat next to you might have paid $359.