So the printer in our shipping department stopped working the other day…
We run pages of mailing labels through it. It is not that old and works great, but I could see that a small piece of a shipping label had peeled off a sheet and stuck to the wheel that feeds the paper through.
Although you could see it and it was only about an inch long, it would stop any new paper from going through and we were getting the “paper jam” reading every time we tried to print with it. Try as I might to get a pair of tweezers down in between the parts to pull off the small piece of sticker, I could not. I realized I would have to take it apart.I had no choice but to tackle the job myself…. it was clear what the problem was, and after all, you could see it right there on the black roller. So after about an hour and a half of me taking the printer carefully apart with my tiny screw driver set…. and still being far from the inner guts that would allow me to simply peel off the small sticker piece, I admitted defeat and took it in to the computer repair shop at the store where I bought it.
I brought it up to the counter and showed the technician what the problem was and he listened politely and then said. “Yea we don’t fix printers anymore, we used to, but they are so cheap now, we don’t bother.” I said “what?”. He said “you can buy a new one for less than two hours of our time, so you can recycle it over there.” and pointed to an Electronics Recycling Bin.
I laughed out loud in disbelief. Welcome to EXTREME CONSUMERISM. We don’t bother to fix even the simplest of issues anymore. Just toss it onto the ever growing garbage heap and buy a new HP printer that is priced on the razor blade model: We will sell it to you cheap and then make you pay for it over again and again every time you need new ink.
I stood there in the store a little stunned and paralyzed. I was looking around as if to say, “Did anyone else hear that? Can you believe what he just said”? — But no one seemed the least bit phased. The technician did not have any remorse. I asked again, could someone there just take it apart and peel off the sticker? Even if that didn’t make it work I would pay them etc. etc. — “Nope, just buy a new one” was the only answer.
There was not a thought of the waste, the pollution, the mindlessness of discarding a perfectly good printer in favor of a brand new one. No cost was imputed to any other other factor other than simply the dollar outlay and most efficient way to get a device up and running and using more HP ink.
Wow, this amazing laser printer that was unimaginable technology just a few years ago. This thing that printed right in your own home a clean crisp page wirelessly from your computer was now seen as worthless trash because of one simple little scrap of paper stuck to the roller.
This was a very visceral example of what we call Fast Fashion in the clothing industry — nothing is for keeping everything is for trashing — just keep moving. I was not going to give in to it — I walked out of the store defiantly printer in hand. I could not find any place that would “fix” my printer. Eventually I climbed in the back of my closet and pulled out a printer that my daughter had brought home from college and fired it up and it works just fine for our purposes. The original printer is now in the back of the closet waiting for the time when I will sit down and spend a half day trying to get to that damn scrap of sticker paper.