HP Ink Copycats On the Prowl
Imagine this scenario: your printer is out of ink and, hoping to save money, you take a trip to your local mom and pop store instead of a big chain. There, you find a lot of HP ink at an incredible value, at several dollars off the regular store price. Too good to be true, right? You buy a few cartridges, take them home and then discover that yes, indeed, it was too good to be true. The ink cartridges either dont work or, even worse, damage your printer! So what happened? Did the seemingly innocent mom and pop back at the discount store pull one over on you?
The truth is that they were probably just as unaware as you were that the ink was no good. International media outlets have been reporting recent upsurges in ink counterfeiting. This first became a major problem in 2007, when its estimated that Hewlett Packard lost one billion dollars in sales due to ink counterfeiting.
Since then, the company has had a secretive team of ink detectives on the prowl, searching for ink scammers. Theyve certainly had their hands busy: in 2010, HP sued several companies for ink counterfeiting after a rash of high jacking incidents in Asia, where several trucks transporting the companys ink cartridges were pulled over and robbed. Soon after, some companies began selling those exact same cartridges under their own names, or instead sold them at a sharp discount to smaller outlets. In fact, some sources state that as many as one in twenty ink cartridges on any given store shelf may be fake!
So what does this mean for you as a consumer? Unfortunately, in the short term this will probably lead to higher prices, as the company loses in profits and has to spend more on its ink detectives. Fortunately, as the international community becomes more aware of the problem and more counterfeiters get shut down, prices should be able to lower again.