You May Not Need a Home Printer

There are ways to avoid owning this annoying piece of equipment

Let’s face it. People love to hate printers. The ink cartridges are ridiculously expensive, the paper jams at inopportune times, and they take up a bunch of space on your desk. Can you get along without a printer at home? These days, many people can.

However, there are exceptions. You’ll probably want to keep your printer if you work from home, ship a lot of pack-ages and need labels, or frequently print items for crafting or children’s projects. A printer can also make sense if you’re one of those people who simply just don’t trust technology as much as a sheet of paper you can hold in your hand.

Outdated Reasons for Printers

For many years, a home printer was considered essential for tasks including theses:

• Printing boarding passes, event tickets, and the like
• Document signing
• Income tax preparation
• Scanning
• Printing photos

Now these activities can either be done digitally — such as presenting a boarding pass or event ticket on your phone — or you can have the printing done elsewhere.

Where to Get Things Printed

If you decide to get rid of your home printer, there will still be the occasional times when you need to print a document or make a few copies. Here are some commonly available options.

• Office supply stores. These types of stores, such as Office Depot and Staples, have print centers inside them. You can start the process online and pick up the documents later, or bring a flash drive to the store and have documents printed on the same day. You can also bring documents into the store to be copied. Office supply stores typically provide other services like binding, stapling, and lamination, etc..
• Your office. Printing personal documents at your workplace may or may not be an option, depending on your employer and the rules in place. Many offices do allow a small amount of personal printing, so it’s worth exploring if you plan to get rid of your home printer. However, don’t use the office printer for anything you don’t want your coworkers or employer to know about — like an application for another job. You wouldn’t want sensitive documents to be accidentally seen by others.

Ditch Your Printer the Right Way

Getting rid of your old home printer doesn’t mean throwing it into the trash bin. Toxic chemicals are in the printer ink and toner cartridges, along with the plastic in the housing, metals in the printed circuits, and other components. All these can be a threat to the environment.

You may be able to sell, donate, or recycle your printer. Do some online research to see what’s available in your community. Some cities and towns even have “rage rooms” where you can use a sledgehammer to destroy inanimate objects. Printers are, unsurprisingly, a very popular choice.

Printer Ink Might Expensive Liquid You Can Buy

Even the cheapest ink in printer replacement cartridges — at about $13 an ounce — costs more than twice as much as Dom Pérignon Champagne. The priciest is closer to $95 an ounce, which would make it $12,160 per gallon. No wonder you’ve been grumbling about the high price of printer ink for years.

Why is printer ink so expensive? It’s primarily because the manufacturers of printers and their corresponding inks are using the same high-profit tactic as razor and blade makers. This tactic, known as the razor-and-blade model, was first used by shaving kit manufacturer Gillette, which sold its disposable razor handles for almost nothing only to build the true price into the cost of replacement blade cartridges.

For example, a consumer-grade inkjet printer may cost just $70 to buy, but it costs $120 for the manufacturer to make. They sell you the printer at a loss, then get you to pay it off (and then some) over time by buying the replacement cartridges.

If you needed one more reason to become a printerless household, now you have it