Consumer Quandaries

There's a nice little printer that I use at work. It's a wireless laserjet printer, and it's only about two years old. And it's now at the end of its life. All the buttons are blinking, which indicates that a service call is needed.

I suppose there's a "service" number to call, but we all know a maintenance call would cost three to four times the value of the printer (when it was brand-new, nonetheless). So I can do one of three things: I can call the printer repairman, whose costs probably include round-trip plane tickets from Madagascar. I can chuck it to the curb, condemning it to eternity in a landfill. Or, I can try and find a recycling center on the other side of town and hope they can reuse even one of its four-thousand parts.

I pretty much hate all of my options.

Herein lies my problem. As a consumer-conscious person, I hate the idea of buying a new plastic product rather than fixing the existing one. But I have to buy the new plastic product. I have to go out and spend money that shouldn't be spent on another cheaply-made printer that will end up breaking in two years. This is 21st-century America.

I guess I'm young enough to be used to it. Something breaks. Go buy a new something. And on the cycle goes. Still, I don't like this cycle. I'd like to be able to call someone when a product malfunctions and have the product fixed. This printer barely has any dust on it, and I'm about to get rid of it. Something just seems wrong with this picture.

Our landfills will continue to fill with a world of cheap plastic stuff that is not worth the cost of a repair. It's kind of sad.