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Are you well organized? Do you have a garage full of well-labeled bins or a pantry full of neatly labeled jars? Do you ship a lot of stuff and print labels? If so, you probably own and cherish your label maker. What’s not to like?
Well, if you’re a Dymo label maker owner, there’s a new scam that might convince you to switch brands – if it doesn’t scare you off labels altogether, that is.
For a certain kind of corporate executive, the printer business is a source of endless temptation. After all, printers go through lots of “consumables.” That means that printer manufacturers don’t just get to sell you a printer, they also have a chance to sell you ink, forever.
There’s nothing wrong with this business. In theory.
In practice, though, printer companies are greedy. They’re not content to be one of many companies offering ink in a competitive market. Rather, they want to be your only ink supplier, and boy oh boy do they want to charge you a lot of money for it – $12,000 per gallon!
No one would voluntarily pay $12,000/gal for ink that costs about $250/oz to manufacture, so the printer companies roll out an endlessly inventive bag of dirty tricks to force you to buy their $12,000/gal product, and keep you buying it, forever.
Now, printers have two consumables, ink and paper, but all the manufacturers’ effort is focused on the ink side. That’s because ink comes in cartridges, and printer companies can add cheap chips to their cartridges; the printer can send these chips to cryptographic challenges that require secret keys held only by the manufacturer. Other manufacturers don’t have the keys, so they can’t make a cartridge that the
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Read the original article: The Worst Timeline: A Printer Company Is Putting DRM in Paper Now