I don't understand why people keep buying HP products - printers in particular. They're awful in every regard. They have zero respect for their users, even after they've over paid for inferior products. They've shown time and time again that they will do everythin within their power to rip you off and screw you over.
> I don't understand why people keep buying HP products - printers in particular.
You need a printer, so you go to the store.
The inkjet printer industry offers you an all-in-one printer/ scanner/ copier with 1200dpi printing for $65. It includes "3 months free instant ink".
The laser printer industry offers you a printer with 600 dpi colour printing, no scanner/copier function, and it costs $265.
You ask the nice young man in the store which is better. He tells you the inkjet gives the best quality for printing photos, and the laser printer is best for business use and people printing 500 pages per week or more.
So you buy the inkjet. Repeat 3 years later after it stops working.
The funny thing is that the laser printer is much better for people who print once a week or less, because toner doesn't dry up and clog the printer. But for the price/quality it's hard to justify buying a new one.
Unless you print colour
Realistically, how many people need and really expect high quality color prints? I’m sure the tech has improved marginally, but I was always disappointed as a kid with inkjet photo prints compared to professional prints. Most people would be better off having professional prints made rather than owning inkjet, very rarely do other documents require high quality color.
how many people need a printer, period? i haven't needed one for decades. if i need to print something i go to a print shop.
my mother (80yrs old) recently bought a printer because she was printing out poems and stories she had written over the years. that made sense for her, but i think that is going to be the exception, unless you live in a suburb or outside a city/village where a print shop is far away.
My kid had like $500 worth for printing available at his college and literally didn't use any of it. That said, during covid, I printed a ton of stuff for the kids for school. And it's nice to have one for crafty projects and printing forms for work and the government that can't yet be done online.
Since I have kids, it happens a few times a week.
Before that, the scanner got a lot of use for storing copies of official documents.
I take photocopies of kid's activity book pages for my kids to draw on so they're more than one-time-use.
When I know I'm going to cook something big and messy I like printing off the recipe first and treat it as disposable. Same goes for when I'm about to go wrench on the car or motorcycle, having all the torque specs and diagrams and what not printed and handy even with greasy grimy hands is nice.
Then in the end I'll still want some kind of scanner around for those things I get that aren't digital yet. Phone "scanning" apps just aren't as good of quality IMO.
But yeah, outside of these things if I want a high-quality print I just print online. Lots of places around me can take print jobs online and have common stuff all ready in an hour or so.
People doing online returns can print the label at home.
This is exactly what I do. There is a great shop a few minutes away and I can order fairly low volumes at great quality. Anything worth printing is worth getting done on their printer which is better quality and the the volume I print likely cheaper overall.
I went to a Brother color laser printer for home and send out high quality color prints to companies with high quality commercial photo grade or print grade equipment
I know it’s the naive buying inkjets, but if you don’t have a laser printer you’re doing it wrong. It’s possible to find them between 100-300 on sale with all the features (and color on the higher end of that).
The only time I’ve bought a new one is because I didn’t buy a feature I wanted (scanning, duplex, color). Now I have all the things and toner that lasts years.
I threw out my HP when it stopped recognizing it had a black cartridge installed. The complaints about using non-HP ink were annoying but at least it worked until it didn't. Replaced it with a Brother laser, never an issue. The loss of color is something I can overlook since I have an Epson photo printer (also never an issue) should I absolutely need to print in color. HP's corporate policy seems to require everything they make to be as annoying as possible.
Just stopping in to give a shout-out to Brother. The black and white laser printer I bought a few years ago (HL-2390DW) is the first reliable printer I have owned in my life.
I had a Brother Multi-Function color scanner/printer that lasted almost 15 years. In the end, the scanner started to malfunction, doing blurry scans, but the printer portion still worked great. Toward the end, it started complaining about low black toner, and I looked up when I last bought black toner: it had been 7 years earlier.
I ended up buying a new Brother scanner/printer that can do full-duplex scanning and printing. The thing is amazing, and I'll likely have it for another 15 years. It's solid and reliable, and the toner lasts a really long time.
This. Also their Linux drivers work.
I recently installed kubuntu on an old gaming PC. Thought I'd see if I could print one day. To my surprise, my Brother printer was already recognized. Printed what I needed right away. No time spent configuring anything, no fuss.
Mine's more than 12 years old. There's nothing that comes even close.
My DCP-7020 is going on 20 pretty soon here. Don't want to jinx it but it's been the reliable workhorse of the home office.
And they have Linux drivers
Yup. I've had a Brother for a long while now, and it replaced a previous Brother only because I reconfigured my office and needed one that would work with wifi.
They also have excellent support, that I’ve only used once in 15 years.
I print maybe once or twice a year. In the past, my workflow was: "need to print, realize cartridge has dried out because it's been so long, go buy a ridiculously-priced new cartridge, finally print the 1 page I needed to".
For the past several years I've had an HP printer, with a subscription that costs £0 unless I print more than 10 pages (at which point it'd cost £1 per 10 extra pages). They send me ink for free automatically, and I never had to worry about it. The printer was stupid cheap.
It's honestly the best printer deal I could've asked for. I'm completely OK with it. It's convenient, virtually free, and I haven't had to think about cartridges in a long, long time.
I don't know -anything- about how HP treats its customers, I'm sure there's lots of horror stories. But... I'm very happy with the current situation, and unless I needed to print more regularly, I don't think I'd ever change.
If you're printing once or twice a year, is it worth owning a printer? I just go to the library or print shop when I (very rarely) need to print something.
Matter of preference of course, but I'd rather the occasional errand over the subscription/troubleshooting/physical storage.
What is this subscription deal ? It looks great. I bought HP Printer because it was the cheapest I could "throw away", because I need to print one page every X years because one stupid legacy organization accepts only paper, but in my case the ink is still drying between two pages.
I paid $100 for a canon laserjet printer from walmart, had it for about two years, still prints on the first included toner cartridge.
I run dnd games and my players like having printed maps and props, so I use it more than once a year, but I’ll never buy inkjet again.
Yep, this is exactly my situation - look up HP Instant Ink for your country, hopefully it'll be of use.
tl;dr version: You sign up for a monthly recurring payment and in return HP monitor your ink levels and number of pages printed, and mail you out new ink as you need it. If you print more than the included pages per month they will charge you an overage. If you stop paying the monthly fee they revoke access to the ink you already have in your procession (ink provided by the subscription service - they don't revoke any ink you have purchased from your local store for example, just to clear.).
My advice, If you only need to print once in a blue moon, get a refrub'ed "office grade" laser printer off eBay (or similar). I picked one up about 10 years ago with 64,000~ prints on it for about £50, and apart from having having to change out some foam pads that had disintegrated over the years, its still printing just fine. Only had to refill the toner once (I don't print a lot) and because the drum and fuser were fine I just ordered a bottle of toner refill.
EDIT: Reread your post. As you are only printing a single page every couple of years, I would adjust my advice. You might be able to ditch the printer completely, When you do need to print use a local library or similar to do the one off print. My local library charges 15p per side for black and 50p per side for colour prints.
Sure I wouldn't use them to print large amounts or even small amounts regularly, but for very very low usage paying a quid once in a blue moon to use someone elses printer and then you can leave the maintenance of the printer to someone else. But granted, you would then have to travel to a place just to print, and if you need to get the document printed ASAP, it might not be the best thing for you. But its another option to consider.
No monthly recurring payment in the UK - I was paying £0, unless I went over 10 pages.
In the US you do have to pay $1.5/mo.
UK prices these days start at £1.50 p/m for their light package. https://instantink.hpconnected.com/uk/en/l/v2 - guess you were grandfathered into to their free package, or was a promo with your printer.
Either grandfathered (I signed up in 2019) or it might've been a new change - I left the UK last year so if it was introduced last year, that would make sense. Good to know though, so I don't keep saying "oh yeah it was free".
My HP 1320m Laser Printer is still printing after 20 years. No streaks or blotches. It has issues when drawing paper from the lower tray, but still printing and duplexing fine. No proper drivers for newer OSX versions, but the generic driver is working fine. I usually use 600dpi, but it's fine with 1200dpi (and so am I).
Have you used an HP printer lately? I have and I don't think they are awful in every regard. The printers I've used work just fine. The output is clean and the paper handling is good.
My current printer at home is a Canon and it's good as well.
I bought a small HP laser printer a couple of years ago, not realizing that the “e” in the model number meant it’d require an HP account and an always on internet connection.
I did the initial setup and declined to create an account, after which it successfully printed 20 pages before refusing to print anything other than a sheet of paper telling me I needed to create an HP account and finish setting it up with the app.
There was absolutely no way it would print without an HP account, and, even if I’d made one, it’d actually refuse to print if it ever didn’t have an internet connection (even over USB). Naturally it’d taken me three weeks or so to print the twenty pages and it was outside the return window, but it made me so upset that I just put it away and bought a new printer from a manufacturer that’s not overtly hostile.
HP lost me as a customer for life with that thing, and actually made me a vocal critic.
The print quality wasn’t as good as I’d hoped for a laser printer, either.
I think in most European jurisdictions you would have been able to return the printer for a refund on the grounds that it didn't work, that it was not of merchantable quality, was misleadingly advertised, etc.
Agreed, I have a nearly decade old HP now and it's been working fine. It's a multi-function, with duplex printing, color, scanning and Postscript. I'm a Postscript fan because it has tended to work much better with Linux than the brand-specific PCLs. We vary in printing, I average probably a couple pages per month, over the years, with kids, we've varied between no printing and lots of printing. I think we're on our third set of cartridges. I would have bought the HP carts, but they were ridiculously priced, I think $450 for a full set of replacements. So I went with an aftermarket for $100 and they've worked fine.
I think this is an interesting issue -- I also have a multi-year old multi-function HP laser printer. Before that, I had another one that lasted multiple years until a cross-country move broke the scanner. I don't really have any issues with HP or their printers. They've been expensive to replace toner, but aside from that, they've worked fine. I don't print much, but when I do, it's more than adequate.
However, my experience doesn't necessarily mean that I'd by an HP printer now. So much has changed with HP over the time I've had this printer that I'm not sure how much of my experience with older products maps to current products. I'm more inclined to listen to people with more recent experience vs. my own personal experience with a company that I'm pretty sure doesn't exist anymore.
If had two Canon lasers and like their output and reliability, but don’t care for their drivers. AirPrint is unreliable unless the printer is awake. I gave up getting CUPS set up in FreeBSD (less necessary with AirPrint, but locked down school Chromebooks need the most generic printer interface possible).
The printers are fine but this post reminded me to cancel my ink subscription as I haven't printed anything in 6 months.
After my subscription date ends in March, they are charging me one final fee of $6.99 for the privilege of cancelling -- first time I have ever seen something like that.
> I have and I don't think they are awful in every regard.
I have too. And the printer insisting that I create an account in some "Smart" website and log into it even before I can print anything with it is beyond annoying.
I got around the problem by finding some old drivers that I had a backup of. But I suspect most people don't give old drivers around and are forced to go through this "Smart" sign up nonsense!
I helped an elderly relative install a brand new all-in-one HP printer over christmas. It was a ridiculous shit show of an experience. The printing quality is OK, but that's the only positive thing I'll say about it. It ships with a bunch of crapware, which nags her about ink subscriptions. It's all quite unpleasant.
When I moved to IT management I had a guy I didn't want to lose but whose attitude I needed to turn around. Lots of malicious compliance type stuff. When I came on board I expended a ton of goodwill capital on removing all desktop printers, just MFCs.
He threw a fit when I lost a political battle and a crappy policy got implemented. My response was to let him know I was approving Katie the HR lady's latest request for a desktop printer and I needed him spec out the lowest price HP inkjet for me. Dude realized if I wasn't on his team things would have been much worse. Slowly I brought him around thanks to HP printers :)
I asked a friend recently. They were completely sold on the subscription service thinking it was the best thing ever. I was questioning that, but I have to admit the printer that (I assume) was included with the subscription was better than I would have bought with endless consumables. It did seem to make sense for them who runs a business in their home-office. It's an in-between volume between personal ink-jet and business laser printing.
Personally, I bought the cheapest Brother laser on sale from Staples and it does all I need.
Because among the normies they still have a good name, I know enough people that are resistent to anything else.
The first printer I owned was a HP DeskJet 500, but those times are long gone.
I think the first one I bought with my own money was a DeskJet 540. Printing seemed much more important then than it does now.
The escape codes were in the manual, I used that so that we could in our Clipper application write a poor man's printer driver.
Basically we had a table with the escape codes for printers, for the common stuff (bold, italic, underline, ....), we would read the entries for the respective model, and then use them accordingly.
Most people don't pay attention, while marketing and availability works.
For what its worth, I bought an HP printer about 8 years ago and was pretty happy with it. It was reliable, fairly simple, the screen UI was genuinely well-designed, and the ink prices were fine with how rarely I printed.
And then I moved from the US to the EU and discovered that printer cartridges are regionally locked. After much research and many calls I learned HP can unlock the printer, but you need you buy completely new cartridges first. I gave away the printer and bought a Brother.
So, yeah, it was decent product clearly ruined by stupid business decisions.
The LaserJet was so good that its reputation is keeping the brand alive 30 years later, despite the company's best efforts to flush it down the toilet.
I’m still printing on my HP LaserJet 1320 from 20 years ago. It’s a tank. Are there equivalent contemporary models?
The same could be said about a lot of companies. I think most people, the vast majority, just don't realize or understand until they purchase a product and have experience with it. Maybe there needs to be more consumer education about operations, products, and corproate behavior towards consumers.
Who even comes up with these bizarre ideas? I cannot believe ideas like this are not only proposed in a professional setting but also approved and implemented! Are we living in a bizarro-world?
Misaligned incentives.
The people who thought this up are clearly not aiming to provide the best-possible customer service. Likely, their goal is cost-saving, with delivery of a minimum-acceptable level of customer service.
Let's be honest, very little of HP's activity seems focussed on providing the best-possible anything.
> best-possible anything
Shareholder "value", i.e. profit
They are, like the vast majority of corporate America, only providing for themselves, and not giving one shit about anyone else, especially their marks, I mean, customers.
Fair point. :)
Although I'd propose to optimise the concept to something like "shareholder value, inasmuch as it influences the rewards of the current leadership team, within their likely period of employment".
Everyone has a budget. Maybe kicking people out to social media or whatever other channel is the best way to make that budget stretch the farthest.
Of course, probably what would happen is the savings would be cut from the customer support budget.
It worked great until the information about the policy got leaked AND made headlines around the world. I'm sure a lot of this stuff is going on which doesn't make it to the HN front page and therefore goes on for years, marginall increasing profits while actively harming customers.
It’s not unusual to add a few minutes wait time for customers that didn’t input their data into the system, or for lower priority customers (ones without a support contract for example).
What HP did is just incompetent management. Anyone that works in CC would advice against his strongly. Handle time will go up as every call will start with a complaint about the long wait time, agents will disengage and have higher absenteeism, supervisors will be stressed & angry about it. Brand damage is priceless though. Bravo.
That's probably the key here. The fifteen minute minimum wasn't disclosed to customers, they were made to think there were a bunch of other customers ahead of them in the call queue. Once word got out that the waits were artificially inflated, that's when customers went from annoyed to angry.
A secret like this can be kept for a while, but support turnover is generally pretty high and after they quit/are fired your secrets will leak.
Support is looked at as a cost center only.
This policy was meant to make people give up, it's literally anti-support.
Some companies (Ryanair) have a marketing strategy of coming up with stupid ideas once in a while just to keep people talking about them. However it appears they - unlike HP - know they are in a bizarro-world.
Every time I talk to an MBA grad I hear stuff like this spoken about enthusiastically. I suspect that they moved the business ethics bit to the elective part of the course.
Bold of you to assume there is one
I suspect an adult willing to do these kinds of things is not going to change their ways due to an ethics course.
The best likely outcome of ethics classes is for it to give good people who are naive about the business world some forewarning about dilemmas they're likely to face so they can be prepared to do what's necessary to preserve their integrity and not get caught up in the (possible fake) urgency of the moment.
> Are we living in a bizarro-world?
_Glances around everywhere, winces_
But seriously, how isolated and idiotic does an entire room of people need to be in order to do something like this? Did they not think the internet would go apeshit over such a policy? Was the cost-savings of people giving up on the support line worth this bad publicity? Anyone with an even slightly realistic view of being a customer would guffaw at such a suggestion. This is nothing but outright contempt for their customers.
Ugh, HP. Such a pain to buy from. They're in my "never again" list.
It's not possible to create a policy like this without having contempt for your own customers.
Please help your family, friends and coworkers avoid getting burnt by the smoldering ashes of this once iconic brand.
I will never buy HP products even harder now.
"This one goes to eleven." --Nigel Tufnel
:-)
The company reply says "We're always looking for ways to improve our customer service experience".
It does not continue as it should:
"Clearly we are either the dumbest people on the planet or this is an outright lie. We are not dumb. We hold profit above everything and we already have your money. You could choose to just buy another of our products and be done with it. But noooooooooo. You want us to spend some of our money helping you. As if we care. We don't care. We don't have to care, because we all treat you this way. Get used to it."
[edit to give credit: the "we don't have to care" is from the Lily Tomlin skits about Bell Telephone.]
This phrase, and probably a handful of others, are assigned to hotkeys on the PR flack’s workstation to save time in situations like this.
Pauvre Lavoisier
Mais, il n'ya pas de quoi.
C'est la vie. C'est la guerre.
C'est tout.
{Thanks for getting to the root of this issue. Well done, indeed!}
"Perfection is perfected." --Snoop Dogg
Is it "feedback" or did some dumbass manager finally realize that the sudden cost of adding 15 additional minutes of toll free termination charges to every holding inbound call was a bad idea?
There's more costs to the inbound call than just the labor...
The purpose of the 15 minute delay wasn't to add 15 minutes to the call. It was to encourage the caller to terminate the call.
Yeah they were hoping people would bail out of the call queue and try their other tools by making contacting a human artificially more difficult nd time consuming.
My first crack at doing this without being shitty is maybe they could have a priority queue for people who've gone through the self help section, though you'd have to have some measures to try to detect if people just spam "no it's still not working" on every prompt and then maybe drop them into the regular queue.
As far as I can tell, the system in the US is worse: I tried to get support for a broken HP laptop that’s still under warranty. The only option I found was to pay to subscribe to a support tier that wouldn’t even obviously help. The warranty tool confirms that there’s a warranty and offers no way to invoke it.
Two hours of your time:
1) Document several attempts to contact HP.
2) Attempt a credit card chargeback if available.
3) If it's too late, file a small claims case in your local court. Usually online. You will likely win by default.
With small claims the trouble isn't winning, it's collecting.
What happened when you called main support?
Sea of webpages leading to no ability to call anyone. Maybe I’ll try it again and see if it sucks less now.
Bill and Dave would be spinning if they knew what has been done to their formerly great company.
>We've asked HP to comment. We suspect we'll be waiting longer than 15 minutes.
I love The Register.
HP used to be the gold star standard of what Silicon Valley company was like. They treated their employees and customers so well.
Now they are just about as anti-customer as I’ve ever seen. I blame Carly fiorina for gutting company culture. I encourage everyone to stay far away from any HP product and let this zombie company finally die.
Oh let me check. Is she an MBA? Ah, that's why.
Most engineers as leaders don't ruin companies, MBAs as leaders do.
You need MBAs in your company to keep the leaders grounding in reality. Someone needs to watch the bottom line and say "hey support is costing us $$$" - however MBAs seem to look to cost cutting now vs an investment. That is if support is costing dollars increasing quality is often an answer, but it is something you have to do 5 years in advance.
It's because investments reduce short term returns while hacky cost cutting boosts them immediately. It's not even a novel problem that the current incentive system of the stock market and CEO pay heavily rewards short term rewards, it's not even from this century Jack Welsh pioneered the whole thing back in the 80s.
No, you don't. You need MBAs to reduce everything to money and extract every penny out of processes and people making everyone sad, unsafe, sick, impoverished, etc.
It is planet and civilization destructing mindset.
Have you noticed how MBAs have never created anything? They always take credit for unsustainable short term gains that destroy great companies and present it as a success case?
Like the MBA god Jack Welch, the reason 10% of employees in companies get terminated every year.
We don't need MBAs for the same reason we don't need to believe in horoscopes, or put a colony of termites in our house.
You are missing something: all the entrepreneurs that have failed because they bit off more than they could chew. This is something easy to miss in the discussion but it is important.
MBAs are important, but they need to be kept in their place because as you say they don't create anything.
They have been made important but they don't have to be important.
Especially if our civilization is to survive.
Outstanding post! Best of the best. Truly.
> Have you noticed how MBAs have never created anything?
Actually, I haven't. What I did notice, however, is that they have destroyed most everything they've touched, like, America.
When was this?
I remember consulting in an HP semiconductor facility in the early 2000s and being amazed that anyone could possibly run an ‘advanced’ company so poorly and get away with it.
I guess full disclaimer would be that I am currently running HPE servers and they are the best on the market.. so 500 wrongs eventually can make a right.
Fiorina started it, and Apotheker put the nail in the coffin with the $9B burned on the Autonomy acquisition.
i mean, literally the very first sentence in their statement is a blatant lie that consumers are supposed to just go 'see, they care about us!':
"We're always looking for ways to improve our customer service experience."
in no universe is putting a mandatory 15min wait on a customer calling for help "improve [our] customer service experience" and if they think it actually does, that person should be summarily terminated from their position for being this stupid.
"We're always looking for ways to skirt customer service needs like the big boys at google, et. al., and to maximize our bottom line" is the real translation i guess.
Also, the whole notion of pushing folks to "social channels" means they want to sell things, but rely on the community to support them -- which is a terrible idea for a consumer good.
It BARELY works for very nerdy, enthusiast-based thing. It barely works for open source packages, honestly. But "community based" support for things intended for regular people are uniformly horrible. As exhibits 1 through 1,000,000, I offer any links at all to Microsoft's tech forums.
A response to bad press, not some natural urge to do the right thing.
At a certain size, companies have to start publishing certain things to stay in compliance. I would welcome in the UK/EU for this to include average call wait time for support so I could let it influence my buying decision. Companies can only play games with this because there’s so little transparency and competition in the market can’t work its magic.
I can't recall if this breaks the rules bought I bought a Canon PIXMA TS7720 inkjet for $70 and it prints excellent (imo) photos. I use the glossy paper.
"Initial feedback", blatant lie.
That is an astonishing choice to make. I cannot fathom it.
Fuck you, HP.
>>"We're always looking for ways to improve our customer service experience. ..."
That is a load of absolute bullocks.
Even if we give HP the benefit of the doubt and grant that they genuinely thought the "digital options" would be better and provide quicker resolution.
If you actually care about customer service, you would alert them to the better options and give them real information to encourage them to switch, e.g., while they are on hold tell them "our live chat option typically gives you resolution times 20% quicker than telephone conversations". You do NOT just enshittify your primary option.
Sheesh