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HP & Staples Collude On $8,000/Gallon Ink?
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "HP and Staples are facing an anti-trust lawsuit over replacement printer cartridges. According to the lawsuit, HP paid Staples $100 million to refuse to stock competing ink cartridges. HP could make that back in short order when you consider that printer ink can cost $8,000 per gallon and certain printers deceive users to waste as much as 64% of their ink."
When I worked at best Buy I remember us having wireless canon printers for a short time. I know we always had the HP Wireless printers as well. But Best Buy always seems to pull them quickly cause the only things we could sell with it were paper and ink... no cable :( The 08975123908475239048% markup on USB cables was just that important... although I knew when I left Worst buy that I should have purchased a shit load of USB Cables... they were like 75 cents on my discount at the time. No idea how much they are now, I heard the discount went south int he last few years.
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
Who the hell buys ANY cable from a retailer like Best Buy or Circuit City? Want something worse then USB? Consider Cat5. I love seeing a 25 foot patch cord thats going for anywhere from $25-$40. $1/foot to $1.6/foot. WTF is that? I can buy a thousand feet of the shit for around $80 ($0.08/foot). Yeah, they should get some mark-up for them, but that much?
Wanna "make friends" at a place like Best Buy or Circuit City? Wait till you see Grandma about to buy one of those cables and is being pounced on by the salesguy -- then tell her about the twenty other options for getting that cable for next to nothing. It's worth it just to see the look on the sales persons face. Wonder if they get commissions for ripping people of^W^W^Wselling those cables?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Or the other one.. Expiring ink. The company I worked for used to buy ink in bulk to save money. When we started using some of those cartridges, we found out they had "Expired" and the software would refuse to let you print unless you changed the system date back to a time before the expiration date.
Mostly this is because most users are clueless and don't understand 3 things about inkjet printers:
1) Using plain (uncoated) paper is a bad idea. The paper dust gets in the print heads and clogs them.
2) If your printer has sat along time without being used, it probably has some dried ink stuck in the print nozzles. You need to clean the nozzles in order to get the best print results after it's sat for more than 2-3 days without being used. Even after cleaning, if image quality problems don't go away, you need to throw away the ink cart, no matter how much ink is in it.
3) Old ink carts (there's an expiry date on the box, usually) should be thrown away and not used.
Unfortunately, since they don't understand this, the printer mfr. puts chips in the carts to try to force the issue, when really the problem is user education.
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And they achieve that 10% capacity by having a little inflatable bag inside the cartridge to occupy most of the space, so even if you refill them you won't get much in... You have to burst the bag.
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But then something happened at HP. A number of years later, I remember one of the top dogs in management declaring that they were taking the company in a new direction; that their old methods were being updated to reflect better business models. --This spin-doctored response came as when they were asked why their printers had begun to suck shit.
I today own an HP Laserjet 5L. It is a piece of crud. --It's output looks sharp, but it's a flimsy piece of junk which stopped working properly about a year after I'd bought it. It jams constantly and the toner cartridge seems to run out far more frequently. I'd tell HP to go to hell, but I think they may already be there.
-FL
Only on Slashdot would someone argue that antitrust laws make it harder for new companies to enter the market. By definition, a company can't become subject to the antitrust laws unless it is already a major player in the marketplace. The whole RAM price fixing debacle wasn't solved by the oh-so-perfect market. It was solved by billions of dollars in fines for the companies involved. IIRC, Samsung got a $300 million fine, and other companies got fines in excess of $100 million.
I see the market from an electrical engineering perspective. Overall, it's a complicated feedback system that is very nonlinear. To a certain extent, it can be modeled as a first-order linear system, and this is what the rabid free-marketeers see when they look at it. Any change in the input basically causes the market to immediately adjust its outputs to account for that. However, this perspective is simply wrong. At the very most, it's a rough approximation. First of all, the system has higher order components, by virtue of the fact that each entity in the marketplace roughly forms a first-order system in and of itself, and so the overall system has an order given by the number of entities in the market (about 6 billion). It's also very non-linear, and is subject to the whims of chaos (i.e., sensitive dependence on initial conditions). If, for example, a group of RAM manufacturers wanted to gouge the public and doubled all RAM prices, the demand for RAM wouldn't simply halve: it would decrease in some strange way.
It should also be stated that if Ron Paul had his way, collusion such as this would be perfectly legal.
Just we look back enviously on how those in the 1970's could just split an atom and have nearly limitless energy...
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.