Lack of Regulation Can Be Inefficient

I once had an all-in-one printer, fax, and scanner from a company I won't name. Let's just call the company Harlet Racket for now, or HR for short. This HR printer played every trick in the book to get me to buy ink cartridges that I didn't really need.

For example, if the color cartridge "expired", it wouldn't let me use the black-ink cartridge, which was a separate cartridge, even if I only wanted to print in black-and-white. (I explicitly selected back-and-white-only from the document print settings.) I had to buy a color cartridge just to print black-and-white.

And if I only wanted to scan an image into a computer file, any expired ink cartridge would trigger a series of ink warning messages. It could have been a simple message, but instead they made it a laborious finger dance. You don't need any ink to scan an image into computer memory, so why should I have to press a bunch of nag buttons to bypass ink warnings?

After a few years I ended up spending more on ink cartridges than I did on the all-in-one printer, and I only printed an average of about two-dozen pages a month. (Remember that equipment revenge scene from Office Space?) A search of consumer sites the web revealed that other brands pulled similar shenanigans.

This is a case where capitalism is failing to be efficient. I'm spending time and money on ink cartridges I don't need because Harlet Racket, Inc. is playing games with me. Ideally we'd want Harlet Racket, Inc. to spend its effort and resources on making printing easier and cheaper, not on tricking consumers to waste. However, the latter is quite common.

Landfills are full of gizmos that could have a longer practical life if they used standardized batteries, bulbs, and power adapters; but companies make more money if they use proprietary replacement parts. I could rant on and on about many other sleazy consumer tricks that make us waste time and money and turn prematurely gray. This is not a rational way of things.

Regulation can go a long ways in making our economy more efficient. A lot of it doesn't even have to be "hard" regulation, but merely product labels that would be required to state certain aspects of products that companies don't want consumers to know about, such as usage of proprietary power adapters. That's not dictating behavior, but rather merely informing consumers and investors of potential issues or limitations. It would encourage companies to do things right and make the USA economy more rational and efficient instead of The Land of Gimmicky.