| Not in the industry but the problems here are quite clear: it's a combination of short-term decision making and the way consumers make decisions. Cheap printers are sold at cost or at a loss. The companies make this up on ink cartridges. Obviously this creates an opportunity for third-party cartridges so your printer gets hundreds of firmware updates to try and defeat these cartridges and protect this business model. Ink is also wasted on things like cleaning the heads. This is by design. But why does this model exist? Because consumers make a purchasing decision based on the sticker price not the total cost of ownership. You see this behaviour all over the price. Why are their checked baggage fees, seat allocation fees, etc on airline seats? Because consumers make a decision based solely on the seat price. Companies like McDonald's sell the burger at about cost. They make all their money on the drinks and fries. You can view the burger as almost a loss leader. A bunch of other stuff happens here too, like the medium drink exists solely to get you to buy the large drink (ie it looks like better value). You should never, ever buy a cartridge printer. Ever. Instead, buy a tank printer. It's more expensive but you literally just pour ink into the wells. There's no firmware to stop you from doing this. It's much cheaper to run. All the software for this is terrible unfortunately. There's really no incentive to improve it. Sadly no company has yet disrupted this market and forced change through competition. There was hopes Apple might do this at one point. It obviously never happened. |
Not true any more - McDonald's change their drink pricing so that S, M, and L all cost $1.