There are printer ink subscriptions? And here I thought, ink printers couldn't get more annoying (dried out every time I wanted to print, cartridges costing as much as the printer itself).
I mean that’s a really shitty thing for the environment, but I thought when you sign up for their ink subscription, you authorized them to lock any remaining ink if you ever cancel. The reasoning is probably to discourage people from cancelling right after getting a new cartridge and being able to use a full cartridge of ink. Might be unethical, but not illegal.
If the business model doesn’t allow them to have those situations written off as a loss leader then they need to reevaluate the business model.
The vast majority of the people should forget to cancel and the cost should be enough for you to manage, for some of your customers to get amazing Utility from your service, and for most of your customers to consider your service so valuable they couldn’t think to get rid of it, even if they don’t utilize it fully.
Disney offers meal plans with your vacation. Most people don’t use all the benefit, some people do, and even less people manage to eat at all the most expensive and prestigious places for their meals because they knew how to utilize their benefits to their maximum potential.
Same with game pass, Amazon prime, and basically any prepaid service. The whole thing is balanced to be enticing, convenient, and potentially a massive value prospect to keep people in that golden spot of FOMO so they buy in and not cancel, but not such a great value that you cannibalize your other monetization streams.
Here they made it apparent that it’s not a good value, there is no situation where i can come out on top, so instead of losing on my monthly sub, they also lost unit sales and any good memories and associations I had with their products and services in the past.
There are plenty of things that aren’t illegal but are counter to your intended goals.
Edit: sorry for the wall of text, you caught me with lots to say I guess.
That's a good way of putting it, and it says a lot that they would happily take a loss if it means that there's no chance you could get an edge over them.
It’s worse than it sounds… You’re not actually paying for ink, you’re paying for pages, in a similar context to how you used to pay for minutes for your cell phone.
A buck a month gets you 10 pages printed, 100 pages printed a month sets you back $6/mo, and so on.
The ink is shipped “free” when your cartridge runs out, and naturally, they figured out how to increase the ink capacity in the carts to be much higher than the ones they sell, so shipping a cart out will be much less frequent if you’re ponying up for each page you print.
Odds are it’ll be cheaper over the life of your printer as long as you’re a member of the residual income brigade…
Honestly, I don’t quite get how there are still publications being done through these publishers. IMHO that makes me suspect some sort of under the table kickbacks to the authors of the study or the institution. Anything published in a non-Open Access publication should automatically be flagged for conflict of interest for kickbacks from the publisher to the authors.
Authors don’t get paid for their submissions. As I understand it, a lot of the professional societies are the actual owners of the journals in their respective fields, and have a profit sharing arrangement with publishers. Here is an example of the American Sociological Association, which owns the flagship US sociology journals opposing open science initiatives because they might hurt their bottom line. …wordpress.com/…/asas-letter-against-the-public-i…
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