The curse of "freebies"
When concluding the purchase of my laptop on Saturday I had to refuse some interesting freebies (particularly a memory stick) to avoid the hassle of being saddled with a free printer. This would be my second free printer refusal of the year.
Why refuse something that's free? Because it isn't - you pay in the form of taxes on the pre-rebate price, the form of time for filling out rebate forms, waiting, and depositing any cheques that appear. Postage stamps are a further cost, and things also occasionally get lost in the mail.
That would be just the financial cost, not the cost of space or the environmental impact of more junk kicking around.
Comments
Mark (not verified)
Fri, 2006-11-17 12:21
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Why not get the freebie and
Why not get the freebie and give it away to someone who you think would really appreciate it? I'm sure there are families who would be happy to get a free printer or memory stick.
David
Fri, 2006-11-17 13:31
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Well, "free" doesn't
Well, "free" doesn't necessarily mean free, as I mentioned earlier.
These printers are also the sort that they basically give away in order to make money off the costs of ink. You don't need to print all that many pages before a laser becomes more cost effective, and the printers themselves tend to fall apart rather rapidly, creating more junk in the landfills. Hence I'm not sure how much good I'd be doing anyone if I were to give them such a device anyways.
I personally would have liked the memory stick for usage as a backup device, but in the end I decided that it would be cheaper for me to buy one than get that free one.
Sarennah
Tue, 2006-11-21 09:06
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Printers
We're getting a small collection of mostly-working sometimes-not-working printers at our house. When you combine them you can usually get at least one to work! I don't know why printers are always so finicky.
David
Tue, 2006-11-21 11:53
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They're not built to
They're not built to particularly high specs, but still try to get high performance.