Hp And Planned Printer Obsolescence ?

[Anonymous]

Hp And Planned Printer Obsolescence ?

Planned obsolescence or my bad luck
Last week my printer suffered a paper jam. I managed to get the paper out of it, but I couldn’t make any progress in silencing the chiming, screeching, grinding, groaning and chattering noises.

The next morning I made a pilgrimage back to Staples where I had purchased it in January.

Sara, the assistant manager, assigned me to Blake in the tech department after managing to confirm that the printer was still under warranty and that I had not abused it nor sworn at it needlessly.

Blake immediately got on the phone to Hewlett-Packard (it hadn’t occurred to me that I would be dealing with HP) and spent an hour negotiating with an HP rep somewhere.

Finally the rep wanted to talk to me.

He had a series of tests he wanted me to run in an effort to troubleshoot the issue.

“But I’m at the store,” I told him. “There’s no way we can set the printer up here.”

“How long will it take you to get home?” he asked in broken English.

Instantaneously putting my lightning-math brain to work, I decreed that I could be home and have the printer set up in fifteen minutes or so.

“Call me back in half an hour,” he said. “Here’s the phone number and here’s a case number for you.”

I thanked Blake for his efforts and headed out the door, hoping that my misbehaving merchandise wouldn’t set off shoplifting alarms.

Once home, I reconnected the printer and called the HP number.

After a couple of strange beeps, an automated voice told me that the number I was calling didn’t exist and advised me to hang up and be sure that I had dialed (punched in) the number correctly.

I went through this a couple of times and finally called back to Staples.

It turns out that the HP rep had transposed a couple of digits in the callback number (I’m sure it was accidental and he wasn’t trying to avoid me).

After wending my way through the now-required maze of inscrutable and indecipherable phone menu options, I finally encountered a human being who proceeded to walk me through a whole series of troubleshooting tests – none of which yielded any positive results.

I got transferred up the bureaucratic ladder to a supervisor who assured me that I did indeed have a unique situation; their tech department had never come up against anything like this before.

She was very nice, very polite and arranged to have a refurbished replacement shipped to me – after getting my Visa number to be sure that I would return the old printer.

It’s to the credit of HP and FedEx (though I had requested UPS delivery) that the printer arrived three days before she had promised it would.

I now have a “new” HP printer, the old one having lasted only eight months.

There’s only one small snag. The “new” printer refuses to accept my “old” ink cartridges. In fact, there are labels everywhere telling me that I need to set it up with the cartridges shipped with the replacement unit.

There were no cartridges included.

I sense despondency and dejection on the horizon.
The inkjet printer that just died had replaced a laser printer that failed to make it to the two-year mark. Two other laser printers met untimely demises. Margaret and I aren’t hard on printers. We don’t crank out reams and reams of printed material. Why don’t they last?

Interestingly, while I was dealing with Blake at our Staples store, he told me that paper jams are often fatal for printers. The problem seems to be that the nylon gears in the machines can’t take the stress of multiple sheets of paper piling up in the innards the brass.

My question: How much would production costs go up if HP used metal instead of plastic for the gears? A couple of dollars?

It stands to reason, from my limited view, that printers would last longer and good will would be created on behalf of the manufacturer if that substitution were made.

And look at the time savings. Blake was on the phone with HP for about an hour. I was on the phone with them when I got home for another hour. They had to ship me a new machine as well as pay the return shipping. I’m going to be on the phone with them again to try to solve the ink cartridge crisis.
Blake also told me, with a shrug of his shoulders, that the life expectancy for printers seems to be rapidly sinking (I can vouch for that).

What has happened to the old-fashioned concept of quality?
My prehistoric Canon bubble jet printer weighed a ton and it was slow, but it would crank out page after page after page without any hassle and I could quickly and easily refill the cartridges for a couple of dollars each.Are we dealing with progress?

[Author]

September 20, 2012 at 8:06 AM