A la guerre comme à la guerre! - PART 3

SOME REVELATIONS ABOUT THE AFTERMARKET IN EUROPE AND ESPECIALLY IN EASTERN EUROPE:

Part 3:

We came with peace

The war occurs not only on the battle fields (court rooms, mass media, TV), but also in peaceful conditions. OEMs have made it a habit to inform users (SMEs, individual users) that they do not have to throw away empties, but return them to the OEM after the use. In the USA, for instance, OEMs even stick the return address with the paid mailing fee on the box of cartridges with a request to return the empty to the address, thus, helping to the environment. The strategy is partially true: the user does not have to throw the material and harm the nature, but s/he sends it back to the company that “re-uses” it. A certain % of users that are not familiar with the particularity of the business do so. They send the empty and an OEM’s representative hurries to supply the customer with another brand-new OEM product. But the user is not informed that empties have already become a “currency”. Companies sell and buy empties. Lots of them earn fortunes by trading with empties that had been “gratefully” sent back by users.

Another winning strategy to tell the customer that compatible and recycled products are not good (in fact, nobody would say “not good”, OEMs use stronger words “forbidden, banned, not advised, etc) is to openly state it in the manual for use. If you look through the manuals that go with Epson, Lexmark and HP printers, you will find a clause that the company does not have any responsibility and will not repair the equipment in their service centers, if non-compatible (recycled, non-OEM compatible products) consumables are used. And I am sure their service centers would not repair the equipment if there is a suspicion that non-compatible materials were utilized. Thank God there are other service centers.

OEMs initiate campaigns against the use of “not our” consumables. For example, a couple of weeks ago I came across a long article of a renowned professor on a website of a European university. This article named “Why I do not use compatible and recycled cartridges in my printers” pointed how a recycled cartridge could harm the printing device. The reasons were too general to be true: low printing quality, loss in time and number of printed pages, deterioration of the printer, frequent repairs. The professor aimed the general public and not specialists, since any specialist would cry out loud: but OEMs use recycled cartridges too, the empties that they collect are not always sold away, but restored and sold as new. I do not intend to go deeper into argumentation; I just want to show that OEMs initiate similar campaigns to build up a strong perception of how good OEM consumables are in the minds of unsophisticated users and incite the users against other alternatives for consumables.