• FinalBoy1975@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I wanna know: Where is the better business bureau? Do they do any actual work to protect consumers from these shady business practices? Where’s the legislation to protect consumers from this bullshit? The better business bureau isn’t very useful. This type of stuff should be illegal.

    • theneverfox@pawb.social
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      1 year ago

      They’re just a company themselves. They’re basically like Yelp from several generations ago… They’re not a consumer protection agency so much marketing/reviews from back when it all had to be compiled on paper by hand

    • potustheplant@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      You do understand what Instant Ink is, right? You’re not buying cartridges, you’re buying how many pages you can print. If you cancel your subscription and run out of pages to print, it no longer lets you print anything. Call me crazy but that makes sense.

      This is pretty awful in the sense that it generates waste but it’s also necessary for people not to abuse the system. Think about it like this, I buy 1 month of the cheapest plan, it costs me less than 1 cartridge and 1 cartridge can print more than the maximum amount of pages of my plan, I cancel said plan and keep using cartridge. Do you see how you could “game” the system to buy insanely cheap cartridges?

      There’s probably a better solution though. For example, they could try to come up with a way to identify people and/or printers used in the way I described before and prevent them from signing up to the service again.

      • FinalBoy1975@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I know a better solution! Just don’t have this kind of subscription! It’s wasteful, takes advantage of consumers, and it’s difficult to understand. It’s totally inappropriate to sell a printer to someone and limit / control their use of it with a subscription. The world of printing at home with HP needs a reboot, restarting again from: buy the printer and the supplies for it, print the things. This is why I’ve been using printers that are not HP since forever. In the old days, HP ink was the most expensive to buy but the printers were very cheap, the cheapest you could find at any store. This company has spent decades and decades controlling the ink and trying to get people to pay for the ink. It all started with being the cheapest printer at the store and being the most expensive ink at the store. 30 years or so later (plus or minus) we have this insanity. I like my setup for home printing. My printer, my ink, my paper. I print all I want.

        • potustheplant@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It’s optional. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it. You can’t complain because the service works as described.

          IMO this subscription model only makes sense if you have a business and print a lot of pages per month. For a normal user it doesn’t make much sense.

      • WhoRoger@lemmy.worldOP
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        1 year ago

        Stop with this bullshit. This is exactly the kind of bullshit subscriptions this community is against.