"Jan Alter" writes:

"davy" wrote in message
...

Anyone seen the article in the Daily Mail UK Newspaper today (Tuesday
20th Nov).

http://img853.imageshack.us/img853/298/image2uis.jpg

Not a bad business, thought I'd share with you.

Unlike Joel's post (since I have been a bit out of the mainstreadm)
posits, I hadn't seen the picture, but my first thought was: if one
were to want to drink this ink, it would make a more fair comparison.
My next thought was about Austrian economics and marginal value...


The printer companies go out of their way to make a greedy profit from their
ink. There's nothing rare about the ingredients that go into the ink and so
they go out of their way to make the cartridge design often difficult to
replicate and adorn it with a chip to make it further tamper proof. That
includes making it infeasible for the average printer user to refill their
cartridges that would avoid throwing the empty cartrdges into landfills, and
even putting time stamp chips on the cartridges that allow them to not be
used in the printer after a couple of years to protect the printer from
'stale ink' and head clogs. It would seem sufficient to put a label on the
cartridge to tell the user when the cartridge expires just as labels are put
on drug prescriptions to tell the user when not to use the medicine.

I personally have absolutely no beef with private companies doing what
they think they can get away with in the market place in order to make
more money. What I do object to is their use of government force and
monopoly to restrict others in what they can do, thereby giving
themselves an unfair advantage at taxpayer expense to boot. If the
companies want to enforce restrictions, they should jolly well do it
out of their own pockets, so that the costs and benefits of doing this
kind of business become clear---not privatize the profits and
socialize the costs.

. About 10 years ago one paid these companies a premium price for the
printer and a semi-reasonable prices for ink cartridges. The cartridges
weren't chipped and folks could refill at least the Epson brand with
reasonable efficiency. That's been turned around unfortunately because the
companies have learned they can make more profit selling ink rather than the
other way around.

No problem if they can keep it that way in a competitive environment.

I think the only way printer companies are going to start becoming more
efficient to the consumer and thinking of the environment is through
legislation by an outcry from the public. And the probability of that
happening is about the same as no one shopping on Black Friday.

You know, that is like jumping into the hole you are digging for
someone else. Because that is exactly what these companies have done
and continue to do. Legislation is exactly what is not needed. The
removal of legislation would be the right path.
--
Gernot Hassenpflug