Razor Blade Economics - Refill Your Toner Cartridges

My title probably fits in with today's economic outlook - many senior politicians look with horror and more importantly with complete impotence as world economic affairs steam roller their carefully laid targets and forecasts. At times like these we see we are simply hostage to the fortunes of a global economy and our politicians who we blame or praise are largely irrelevant.

But enough of the politics - my article refers to an interesting economic phenomena which you are probably aware of - it sounds like just straight forward economic sense but there is a sinister side which I hope to illustrate.

To quickly explain the article title - I'm sure all men will relate - there is a an economic strategy pursued by many, many companies that is best illustrated with reference to razors. I'm sure we've all purchased the latest razor with the 5 lubricating strips and the ten blades to shave you closer - often purchased very reasonably with a blade or two thrown in free in a glossy presentation pack. To be fair they do improve - so on your next shopping trip you pick up a pack of replacement blades for your new razor - you'll almost certainly be shocked about the price. Often two or three times the cost of the original razor - my local supermarket puts the anti-theft tags on packs of blades but not the razor to illustrate the point,

Welcome to the world of razor blade economics - your product the razor - can really be sold at whatever the price - in some senses it's not important. The razor is heavily discounted and promoted - it's often sold at minimal profit - the real riches lie in the replacement blades that you must buy or your purchase becomes useless i.e. the razor blades.

If you've felt ripped off you are not alone - but unfortunately this practice is not isolated to the razor market and the solution is not as simple as growing a beard. Another less obvious example are printers - inkjet, laser even dot matrix printers. All are heavily discounted - often a superbly engineered and manufactured inkjet printer can be purchased for a very small amount of money.

In some ways you can't blame the companies - they are just maximizing profits - disposable equals replacements which equal more profits. It certainly is not in any companies interest to allow you to reuse a product cheaply and easily.

The concept is also easily illustrated in replacement toner cartridges. If you have any sort of printer you'll have noticed that there is a vast amount of manufacturing that goes into the average toner cartridge - the vast majority of which is discarded when the ink runs out. In more economic naive days these cartridges had little plugs which you could open and refill with ink alas no more.

To use my laser printer as an example - replacing the toner cartridges costs over £200 - a little short of the cost of the printer. I can buy at a specially reduced price (still over £200) if I send them back the old cartridge - in a nice green bag with a tree on it.

The toner cartridge is fine - it's not run out, the rollers are fine, none of the components have suffered excessive wear and tear - it's simply run out of ink. The cartridge would happily run again if refilled but now all the printer manufacturers go to excessive lengths to stop you doing this. Many cartridges have a computer chip which disable printing after so many uses - which is effectively the same as a car manufacturer putting a little chip in your car stopping it working after it's done 60,000 miles.

All these manufacturers produce 'green friendly' schemes to replace or recycle your cartridges in order to portray themselves as eco friendly. The fact is that it takes 2-3 liters of oil to produce an average laser toner cartridge - if you throw it away another has to be produced. Almost all the cartridges could be reused with a little ink top up and the number of new and re-manufactured cartridges would instantly fall - I don't know what the exact environment benefit would be but I suspect it would be huge if everyone did this.