My first “The Unabomber was right” essay was in 2017, and he’s been proven more right with every passing year. In that post, I began,
“As I understand it, Ted believed that technology was destroying society, making us all slaves to it, and taking the joy out of life. I have yet to see how blowing people up addressed this problem, but then he shouldn’t have had to be right about everything. The evidence has been mounting since 1995, when he killed his final victim,that the Unabomber wasn’t quite as crazy as we thought.”
The intensity of that conclusion has only multiplied with time, further technological excesses and inconveniences, and experiences like today’s trip to Staples to buy some wildly over-priced black ink for my crummy Hewlett Packard printer, purchased by my late wife when our ethics training and consulting business was even more financial distress than it is now.
It is a Sunday on Labor Day weekend, and the parking lot at the strip mall near my house was, as I expected, nearly empty. Staples, however, had the longest line at the single register open I had ever seen there. Some of this was the fault of Staples, which like just about every other chain, decided to keep its workforce cut to the minimum after the pandemic eased. After all, where else will the customers go? All of the stores have lousy service now; all of them are understaffed. For that, you can blame the progressive idiocy of raising the minimum wage to the point where it costs too much to pay for minimally-able employees. The result: fewer jobs, inflation, Staples-style (CVS-style, Home Depot-style, etc.) non-service.
But I digress. The huge line moved like a rabbit through the alimentary canal of a snake (maybe slower) because, I soon realized, everyone was using an app on their cell phones, and neither they nor the clerk were quite sure how the system worked. One woman was at the register for 20 minutes all by herself, looking and pounding on her smart phone, showing it to the poor guy trying to check her through. Every single purchase appeared to take at least three times as long as it would have before the addition of the apps to the process.
When I finally got to the head of the line with my three items, it still took too long: I had to enter two phone numbers, confirm my address, and “tap” with my card, but I was easily the quickest customer through the line, because all I did was pay for my stuff. A woman behind me actually said, “Wow! That was quick!”
I replied, “Want to know my secret? I bring up what I want to buy and pay for it.” You warned us, Ted. We just didn’t listen….
Ethics Alarms 
For whatever it’s worth, your crappy printer was basically sold to you at cost, plus a markup for the store.
The printer companies – and the stores – know full well that the profit is made on the ink/toner.
It’s not dissimilar to buying a car. Dealerships make pennies on a new car. They make their bank on service, trade-ins, and upselling warranty plans and undercoating.
And the response to that was companies selling compatible ink cartridges for a lot less than HP and the other printer manufacturers charged. You took somewhat of a chance on the quality of the cartridges, but I can remember buying a lot of them over the internet.
So, the manufacturers struck back! Now printers are smart enough to know whether the ink cartridge you’re using is a genuine HP (or whatever) cartridge. So if you’re using ersatz ink cartridges it is now possible to the printer to disable itself.
I don’t know if the compatible cartridge makers have been able to overcome that little problem, but I’d imagine it would be possible. There has to be some sort of a code in the cartridge identifying it as the real deal — and what one company can do, I’d bet others can as well.
I make more money these days than I used to and I’ve resigned myself to using the HP cartridges. On the other hand, I can usually find either sales or promotions at Staples to offset some of that cost.
We see this sort of thing in warfare: People make bazookas to penetrate the armor on a tank. Then they invent sloped armor to defeat a lot of the anti-tank weaponry. They get high velocity guns, shaped charges on the anti-tank rounds. Then they come up with reactive armor that can defeat the shaped charges. The Army makes TOW2 anti-tank missiles for the infantry. Currently I think infantry can defeat an armored column. So, you have to add infantry to the armored column to protect against enemy infantry (we saw that in 2022 during the first phase of the Russian invasion where their unsupported armor was slaughtered).
Action and reaction. It never ends.
Oh yeah, the late Mrs. Marshall and I had words about that. The printer was cheap, and also doesn’t have a scanner, is difficult to service, and is basically the bottom of the barrel. The epitome of penny wise and pound foolish, or “you get what you pay for.”
And sometimes there is penny wise and pound wise?
My printer dates back (I think) to when I got my old computer in 2014. It was less than $100. I just printed a status report and I’ve printed 35563 pages and scanned 2660 pages so far. So I think I’ve gotten my money’s worth.
It has been showing signs of age, though, and it’s really slow printing postage pages, so thoughts of a new printer trickle through my mind from time to time.
Even so, the bill for the printer cartridges makes me wince every time, and I am confident that a new set of cartridges will be just as expensive.
“The printer companies – and the stores – know full well that the profit is made on the ink/toner.”
I have a story on that…. During the pandemic, we had a printer go down, and we realized that this was a larger problem than usual, because our print fleet’s maintenance department was taking a very. long. time. to deal with it. We didn’t want to be down for any amount of time, so we got a set of five “loaners” that we could use in-house. We bought those loners from Staples and all was well and good…. Until we needed to order ink. Staples did not sell the ink for the printers online, I was told we’d have to go to their closest physical store to pick them up.
“But you carry the ink?” Yes.
“But you sell the printer online?” Yes.
“I’m literally 100 miles from your nearest brick and mortar.” I’m sorry, sir.
“Does any of this make sense to you?” It was a marketing decision.
“We’d like to return the printers.”
And you know what they did? Refund the printers and let us keep them, I have to assume because the process of returning them would be worse.
This brings to mind a a John Prine lyric:
We are living in the future I’ll tell you how I know
I read it in the cartoon strip 15 years ago
We are all riding rocket ships and talking with our minds
Wearing turquoise jewelry and standing in soup lines
I cannot go into a McDonald’s anymore. There’s almost never anyone at the cash register. The ordering kiosks are limited in what you can do with them. It’s a pain in the neck to go inside so my limited patronage is confined to the drive-thru.