From my point of view HP printers are a bad investment.
And they’re investing in the customers in what sense? It’s the customers who make the investment in their products and get their dignity challenged in return.
I have a need for a printer and HP is solidly in the don’t-touch list. Companies that treat their customers so indignantly as HP should simply be raided and closed for good. Or perhaps, HP should realize that morons like this scumbag are a bad investment as a CEO.
I’m sure internally they have an internal dollar figure on cost per customer acquired. Such things as marketing, discounts, product availability and different stores, targeted marketing campaigns, B2B sales reps, I.e.identifying corporate customers before they are entrenched with another vendor and actioning on them first.
So in that mental model, each customer acquired has a cost, and the behavior of that customer has a benefit, I suppose what the HP representative is trying to say is the sale on the printer by itself is insufficient to justify the effort and cost of acquiring a customer. They want recurring revenue. Which everybody does
Yeah, it’s the “loss leader” strategy. Some HP printers are very cheap, sometimes cheaper than the cartridge you need to put in it. They’re doing it ridiculously aggressively.
I wonder whether they’d sell more if they put the prices up but promised no further charges or restrictions? It would give them a unique market position as a seller of premium trustworthy products. Brother is the closest to that at the moment, though their printers aren’t even more expensive. HP is certainly to be avoided.
I have a need for a printer and HP is solidly in the don’t-touch list.
The only HP printers I still recommend are the vintage ones from the pre-2005 era. HP 4050DTN and HP 5000DTN and the like. Absolutely rock-solid laser printers that don’t have DRM or any other shite. Hell, I can get overstuffed cartridges for the 4050 that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage… who does that these days? And they’re capable of taking JetDirect cards clear up to the gigabit level.
