Unfortunately, consumers are price sensitive beings even if it doesn’t make sense. We prefer cheaper upfront costs even if it costs more in the long term. For example, a decent toner printer can cost $300 plus $75/cartridge later on. But the $50 printer works “just as well” and has “only” $50 cartridges, so it’s “cheaper” (ignoring pages/cartridge). This leads to a big race-to-the-bottom (like airline seat prices[a]) that makes margins razor-thin. As such, the manufacturers price gouge you on the ink.
[a]: Everyone complains about airline seat spacing, but nothing short of regulation will fix it because the margins are too thin to not pack everyone like sardines. If you have more leg room on your planes, you make less per flight, and that could put you in the negative.
It's actually worse than that. I have a laser printer which costed me $36, came with a toner actually printed over 400 pages. The genuine replacement toner costs $110 but can only deliver nominal 1000 pages. But that not quite a big problem as there are generic toners for around $10 and can actually deliver over 1000 pages. But I heard later models were virtually blocked from using generic toners via automatic firmware update as result quality dropped dramatically.
The Canon inkjet I had was a completely different story. Genuine cartridges cost over $80, can print no more than 100 pages. Most importantly, after I dump the empty cartridges, the scanner stopped working.
We need serious probe into those malicious behaviors.
Our current laser printer for >$300 had to be replaced right out of the box, apparently checking whether that thing turns on without errors is asking too much. Then the replacement couldn't connect with the wifi network.
Maybe there are exceptions beyond consumer price ranges, but the only printer I've seen that actually worked was an inkjet over 20 years ago. Probably because it was too dumb to do anything other than print.
You know you can buy premium seats on most airlines, right? The revealed customer preference is the cheaper ticket. This is a good thing, not a bad thing.
For printers, it's getting hard to even be able to buy something at a premium that will let you refill the toner yourself. But jumping to regulation to fix it is a bit of a leap, especially if your argument relies on the airline ticket thing.
From an economic perspective, regulation is the right thing here.
Free markets work well with 100% transparency. That's the assumption in Adam Smith's models. If I buy a printer, and have complete awareness of the pain it will cause me and the long-term costs, and choose to spend $50 over $100, the free market is working fine.
If I go into a store and can't buy a printer without spending hours reading web pages (thousands of dollars of my time), and buy an inferior option due to intentional opacity, we need regulation.
This is very much the latter and not the former.
Airlines have better transparency than printer makers, by far. I might get ripped off on luggage, but I usually know that buying the ticket. I have no way to know a printer will disable itself in 6 months unless I pay HP off.
I blame Carly Fiorina for cannibalizing HP. Before her, it was a brand you could trust. After her, it's scam after scam. Before her, it had solid and unique R&D and brilliant people wanted to go there. After her, not a single competent engineer will work there. In the meantime, HP stock has not kept up with inflation. HP was just above $20 in 2007, and now it's just below $30. It has no fundamentals or competitive advantage in any real way.
It is a bad thing to drive the markets towards people’s bad habits to only provide them with a product they hate.
In your airline example, focusing on low price is what has lead to budget airlines charging $80 for a carryon.
People just end up spending money they didn’t know they were going to have to spend on a product they probably didn’t want and is often worse quality than the competition.
It’s only good business because people are idiots and the people in these games are out to fleece idiots, not build a brand.
It's funny you mention the whole airline thing. Airline's don't even make money from passengers buying tickets at this point. It's a net-loss in most cases when people fly. They make their profits from loyalty programs mostly. Airlines are banks at this point and operate as such mostly. People flying and travelling is second-hand now.
[a]: Everyone complains about airline seat spacing, but nothing short of regulation will fix it because the margins are too thin to not pack everyone like sardines. If you have more leg room on your planes, you make less per flight, and that could put you in the negative.