Call 1-800-GOT-JUNK? at Susan Labandibar

Call 1-800-GOT-JUNK?

Printers are the poster child for e-waste, aren’t they? Especially those cheapo inkjets that don’t even come with a full cartridge.
I have a Lexmark X2650 printer that was priced so low it cost less to buy the unit than to purchase the replacement cartridges–which are practically impossible to find. Nor can you refill the original ones. On the other hand, the printer cartridges for my trusty Canon S330 cost as little as $1.50 each. The secret? You don’t replace the print head with every cartridge.

Now, imagine that your cheap printer stops working. How strong is your motivation to spend money fixing it? I have seen plenty of people throw out printers simply because they stopped working and they were reluctant to take the first troubleshooting step, which is to replace the cartridge. In case replacing the cartridge didn’t fix the problem, they would then be stuck with an expensive new cartridge as well as a non-working printer.
At this point, in order to amortize their losses on the cartridge, they may bring the printer to a repair shop. (In all probability, buying a new printer that takes the same cartridge is not possible, because the manufacturers deliberately change the cartridge design frequently. )

This is where repair shops like ours go crazy. The printer is not manufactured to be repairable!

This lesson came home to me many years ago when I still spent a fair amount of time repairing computers. Seeing that there were no Epson Authorized printer repair centers in the vicinity, I decided that we should become certified to fix Epson printers. While most vendors were starting to have online training and exams, at that point Epson still had a training center outside of Philadelphia. To become authorized, I had to attend a two-day class there.

The class was an amazing exercise in futility. Although the program lasted two days, and only covered the repair of inkjet printers, our class was unable to actually fix the broken printers we were given. Even with the instructor’s help, we were unable to clear clogs in the printhead, which is a chronic problem with Epson printers.

Not surprisingly, the repair training facility was closed not long after. Even at the time of my visit, the instructor–who had been training printer repair at the center for many years–knew that his job was becoming obsolete. On the first day, he suddenly veered off into a diatribe about how today’s printers were junk. He ended up telling us that we wouldn’t learn our lesson until the entire surface of the earth was covered with broken printers. Too bad I lost contact with him afterwards. I’ll bet that he loved the movie WALL-E.