[Louis Rossmann] Brother turns heel & becomes anti-consumer printer company
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2D printers used to be like this.
They all worked with open, universal drivers, no additional software, and any ink cartridge that fit inside the bay.
But then companies figured out that people will just buy the cheapest printer on offer, regardless of everything else.I think that if one wants to change this, it probably involves some kind of regulation that affects how people shop, or at least a shift in social norms, so that some kind of metric of over-time cost is prominently featured next to the up-front price on goods.
We've seen shifts like that before.
There was a point in time where it was normal, in the United States, to haggle over the prices of goods. It really wasn't all that long ago. Today, that virtually doesn't exist at all, except for over a very few big-ticket items, like cars and houses.
The change started when some people...I think Quakers...decided to start selling their goods with a no-haggle policy. NPR Planet Money did an episode on it some time back...lemme see if I can go dig it up.
Yeah, here we are:
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/415287577
:::spoiler Relevant snippet
Episode 633: The Birth And Death Of The Price Tag
JIANG: The whole world I've known is in this price-tag world. Everything has a price, one price.
GOLDSTEIN: But when you take the long view of the historical world, this price-tag world is like a bizarre aberration. You know, for almost all of the history of human commerce - for thousands of years - you walk into a store, and you point to something. And you say, how much does that cost? The guy at the store is going to say, how much you got? You know, everything was a negotiation. And there were good reasons the world was this way.
JIANG: Say I have a store and - I don't know - I'm selling eggs. And a guy walks in, and he looks like he has all day to haggle. And he's really been scouting out the best place to buy eggs. So I sell him a dozen eggs for a buck 50.
GOLDSTEIN: So then, a few minutes later, somebody else comes in. This guy's wearing fancy shoes, clearly does not have a lot of time to haggle. So you sell him eggs for twice as much. You sell him eggs for 3 bucks.
JIANG: Each customer pays what they think is a fair price. I make a profit. We all win.
GOLDSTEIN: This was just the way things were, and almost everybody accepted it, everybody except this one religious group, the Quakers. Robert Phillips, the consultant we talked about the Coke thing, he said the Quakers did this really fringy, radical thing.
PHILLIPS: They would have a fixed price. The Quaker would - the merchant would say what the price is, and that price would be the same for everybody.
GOLDSTEIN: That's it. Having one price for each item, that was the Quakers' radical thing. They thought haggling was just fundamentally unfair. They thought charging different people different prices for the same thing was morally wrong.
JIANG: You can imagine walking into a store and pointing to a dozen eggs and getting all fired up to do an egg haggle.
GOLDSTEIN: Let's go. Let's do this.
JIANG: And then your friend, like, kind of elbows you and says, no, no, this is a Quaker store.
GOLDSTEIN: No haggling. No haggling here.
JIANG: What are you doing?
GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, the Quakers were definitely, definitely in a real minority with this no-haggle thing.
JIANG: But as the modern economy got going in the 1800s and businesses starting getting bigger and bigger, haggle worlds got to be a hassle.
GOLDSTEIN: You know, if you are running a store, if you're working at a store, you need to know a lot to haggle. You need to know how much you paid for the stuff, how much your competitors are selling it for. You need to know how much different customers are willing to pay. Robert Phillips says you couldn't just hire some kid on summer vacation to come and sell stuff at your store.
PHILLIPS: Clerks usually had long apprenticeships before they could actually be allowed behind the counter. So they had to spend a couple of years learning the business.
GOLDSTEIN: Years?
PHILLIPS: Yeah, typically. Learning how to haggle before you would let them be left alone.
JIANG: Haggling is a pain for customers, too. Imagine you're at some store and there are five people in front of you in line. And you have to wait for them to all go through that haggling process before you can buy your shirts or whatever.
GOLDSTEIN: So finally around 1870, a few people decided to take a big risk. They decided to break with haggle world. They invented the price tag, this actual piece of paper stuck on each thing that tells you the price - not some starting offer subject to negotiation, but the price. And inventing the price tag was not just about fairness or what was morally right; it was about building really big stores.
PHILLIPS: Two stores here in New York, Macy's. And Macy was a Quaker. And he featured fixed prices. The most famous one was Wanamaker's in Philadelphia.
JIANG: Wanamaker and Macy's, they're building these new things, these department stores. And they're trying to hire all of these clerks, but they don't want to train them for years and have them become master hagglers. So the price tag solves this problem. It makes it easy for them to hire the clerks.
PHILLIPS: All they had to do was be essentially what clerks are today, you know, knowledgeable about the fabric. Oh, madam, this would look wonderful on you. They didn't have to do pricing. They didn't have to haggle. They didn't have to know the cost of items.
JIANG: Wanamaker becomes this kind of evangelist for the price tag. He says, look, the price tag, it means you, the customer, you don't have to arm wrestle with the clerk anymore when you buy things.
PHILLIPS: There's no longer a war between the seller and the buyer, which is what he called the higgling and the haggling. Everyone can come into Wanamaker's and know they will be treated the same.
JIANG: Customers loved it. The price tag spread. It was everywhere.
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That wasn't driven by regulation, but by consumer preference. Consumers (usually, outside maybe upscale restaurants) demand to see the up-front cost of something they buy before buying it. So it's possible that if costs keep shifting from the up-front cost that we can readily see at the time of purchase into over-time costs that we cannot as readily see, we might see consumers just refuse to buy items from retailers that don't also show some kind of a reasonable over-time cost also visible.
Or maybe the government could require some level of disclosure of over-time costs to be shown when selling an item, they way they standardized display of credit card interest rates.
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I want to agree, but has there ever been a case of the free market saving itself?
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it will just be cycles (assuming we all survive long enough). I’m in an industry where the large companies are imploding and smaller companies are starting to shine again, eventually those companies will likely become big as well and implode.
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Isn’t prusa now doing anti consumer / closed source stuff?
You are not completely wrong, they have one printer with closed sources.
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Aren't you confusing them with Bambu?
Their slicer is based on Prusa's exactly because Prusa isn't doing closed source.
One of the latest Prusa printer is closed source
If I remember correctly
Core xy -
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Welp, I guess that pen plotter I built last year is going to be my full time printer
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Man I've had a brother printer so long because of their Linux support this is so annoying
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Sad to hear Louis is having family issues
Took me three tries to figure out what was happening, then I was sad.
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Honestly, more people should probably do that. If you have a low printing volume, you'll save a lot of money by going to a store to get prints.
Yes, you can argue that you need the convenience of having a printer right there. Just realize you're spending a lot of extra money for that convenience.
Its a convenience thing, I have one in my office. Some months I do 500-2000...in fact that was one month and why I bought it but after that it has been nothing
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What we actually need is to stop fucking printing.
We need a foldable A3 size e-ink reader that you can use like a folder.I'd be more interested in something more iPad sized with an e-ink display that is more generally usable.
The ReMarkable tablets for example have interesting hardware but the software fits such a narrow use case and I don't think you could slap like, Linux on it or something.
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That's what we did.
For the few pages we need to print, I can use the machine at the library for $0.10/page.
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One of the latest Prusa printer is closed source
If I remember correctly
Core xyWhat is that even supposed to mean?
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Man I've had a brother printer so long because of their Linux support this is so annoying
Same. I'm good for a while, but it's going to suck if I ever need to replace it.
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Brother sucks now!?
Truly, this is the canary in the coal mine moment.
Nah, that time has long passed. Brother is probably less bad than many of its competitors, but that doesn't make it good.
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I used to work for canon as a service tech. They are a wildly scummy company that routinely goes out of their way to fuck over their employees and customers.
Hey, I work for canon in tech support right now. Trying to find a better job though haha
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So issue here is privacy, the library is likely scanning whatever device connected, not just the files and file metadata
$5 USB fob for printing
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I don't think I'm making it more than it is. Just can't believe the God-damned Russians got to Brother, too.
Me omw to hack and blackmail brother ceo to get him to enshittify all their printers
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So issue here is privacy, the library is likely scanning whatever device connected, not just the files and file metadata
I kind of doubt it. Local libraries have a hard time staying open due to funding.
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So issue here is privacy, the library is likely scanning whatever device connected, not just the files and file metadata
Seriously? The library computers are running Windows 8 I highly doubt they have the technical expertise to do anything. Also why would they?
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I'm glad there's a printer service close to where I live, I can go there and print every page for cents. There's also one on my faculty, more expensive, but still affordable. I only use my HP printer/scanner to scan documents, ink is expensive as hell.
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Honestly, more people should probably do that. If you have a low printing volume, you'll save a lot of money by going to a store to get prints.
Yes, you can argue that you need the convenience of having a printer right there. Just realize you're spending a lot of extra money for that convenience.
I actually bought an old used Brother printer for $20, and it came with toner and everything already, so since I do not print a lot, my only recurring fee is paper and it is miniscule. And should I need to replace the toner, it is still widely available.
