Monday 25 February 2013

Printer Cartridge Scam

I have always maintained, and have yet to be proved wrong, that the market should not be left alone to regulate themselves because when nobody is looking, they will rip us off in the search for a profit and a report in the Guardian Money pages has shown what we have known all along about print cartridges, the manufacturers have been ripping us off for years.
While the size of the cartridge has stayed the same, the size of the sponges inside which hold the ink, have progressively reduced over the years and the rest of the cartridge is now simply empty space.
As well as ripping us off over the amount of ink in the cartridge, the manufacturers have been trying to stop consumers from buying cheaper refills, forcing us to buy their more expensive products.
Chris Brooks, technical director of industry group the UK Cartridge Remanufacturers Association states: 'The big printer companies do all they can to squeeze ever-increasing amounts of cash out of the poor consumer in exchange for less ink.'
The conning print manufacturers have also introduced a new XL cartridge, and priced it appropriately, even though it contains as much ink as was previously offered in the standard cartridge. 
The argument made by Epson and HP is that as the printers print heads are more efficient today, we need less ink to print the same amount of pages as previously but which may be more persuasive if the cost had come down but with cartridges costing less than 50p to make, we get less ink while the manufacturers sell us cartridges at the same price and maintain their massive markup.
As the refilling business has eaten into the cartridge makes profits, they now include embedded technology to block cheap refills so if you buy a printer from Epson or HP, we have no choice but to buy their cartridges.
It seems that we are being surrounded by a bunch of corporate thieves everywhere we turn, conning the public for a profit and another page to be added to the well thumbed book of why unregulated Capitalism is a disaster and just a free pass to just rip everyone off. 
Where is the Office of Fair Trading or the 

5 comments:

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Lucy said...

More than drinking Pina Coladas and getting caught in the rain?

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Lucy said...

Mrs H. Clinton

Anonymous said...

gag me. her daughter isn't any better either. if it has to be someone whose ideals disgust me they could at least be attractive, like say...... oh who was the House leader...... Ah, nancy Pelosi. At least she is easy to look at.

q