[Hidden-tech] a sales vehicle for ink cartridges

[Dave DelVecchio]

"I've been predicting for years that we will someday see a promotion
like "buy two sets of cartridges and
get the printer free." It's almost that way now." -Will Loving

That is true already with color laser. I've seen promotions from HP,
QMS, Dell, and others where if you guarantee to source all the
consumables direct from them for anywhere from one to three years and
agree to take some minimum quantity (two toners per month, for example),
you get a "free" color laser printer.

As always, buyer beware because there is no such thing as a free lunch -
they don't guarantee their consumables pricing for the contract term.
Without getting into specifics as to which vendor pulled this scam
(although I will say it was not HP since their name was bandied about),
we had one client that took up an "offer too good to be true" and after
month #3, the toner price increased by almost 50%, well above what you
could get by ordering the toner through normal channels.

Dave DelVecchio
General Manager
Innovative Business Systems, Inc.
161 Northampton Street
Easthampton, MA 01027
Phone: 413-584-4274 
E-mail: ddelvecchio at for-ibs.com
web: www.for-ibs.com



-----Original Message-----
From: hidden-discuss-bounces at lists.hidden-tech.net
[mailto:hidden-discuss-bounces at lists.hidden-tech.net] On Behalf Of Will
Loving
Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2006 12:41 PM
To: hidden-discuss at lists.hidden-tech.net
Subject: [SPAM] - Re: [Hidden-tech] Local Ink-Jet Printer Repair - Email
has different SMTP TO: and MIME TO: fields in the email addresses

   ** Be a Good Dobee and help the group, you must be counted to post .
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On the topic of inkjet printers as "a sales vehicle for ink cartridges",
I
offer this little story:

My father - born in 1911 - was childhood friends with Dave Packard (the
"P"
in HP). They grew up together and worked together as teenagers
installing
antennas on people's houses and repairing radios. Dave went off to
Stanford
and the rest is history. Over the years my Dad and Dave stayed in touch
and
in the year before both of them died, I escorted my father to Los Altos
to
visit with Dave one last time (this would have been 1996 I think).

As we were eating breakfast one morning, Dave posed the following
question:
"We have a plant in Idaho that makes 1,000,000 inkjet cartridges a day.
The
wholesalers sell them for about $17 each and the retailers sell them for
about $25-30 each. How much do you think it costs us in parts and labor
to
manufacturer them?" ...long pause... We took our best guesses but were
way
high. The answer was $0.50, $0.25 in labor and $0.25 in parts. That was
in
1996 and I'm sure costs have only gone down since them.

Of course that doesn't take into account R&D budgets, but you know that
they
are still making LOTS of money on cartridges. I've been predicting for
years
that we will someday see a promotion like "buy two sets of cartridges
and
get the printer free." It's almost that way now.

Will

Will Loving, President
Dedication Technologies, Inc.



on 8/2/06 9:25 PM, Jonathan Dill at jfdill at jfdill.com wrote:

>    ** Be a Good Dobee and help the group, you must be counted to post
.
>    ** Fill out the survey/skills inventory in the member's area.
> 
> 
> David Shakun wrote:
>> Any recommendations for area businesses that perform printer (inkjet,
>> laser) repair?
> An inkjet printer is essentially a sales vehicle for ink cartridges.
If
> you put environmental concerns aside, I would expect it to almost
never
> be cost-effective to repair an inkjet printer unless it is a really
> high-end unit, or you can find someone who repairs a lot of inkjet
> printers so can do it at a lower cost.  I wonder if any manufacturers
> out there are taking back old printers and trying to recycle them or
> anything, that would definitely be a good thing and I'd like to hear
> about it.  Beware of Dell inkjets though, they are cheap plastic junk
> and poorly supported in my opinion.
> 
> If the printer is out of warranty, it looks like something is clogged
> up, and you won't cry if it ends up trashing your printer, you might
be
> able to do something with swabs and high purity isopropyl alcohol
> (97-99%).  I used to do that myself when inkjets were more expensive.
> The best swabs are foam-tipped, the ones I got were sold for cleaning
> the heads in magnetic tape drives.  Cotton swabs can leave fibers that
> will leave streaks on printouts.
> 
> Jonathan
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-- 

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- Developers of StudioSchool Pro -

Professional FileMaker Pro Database Development
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-----------------------------------
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