Sometimes, the most outrageous marketing schemes can be forced upon the free enterprise market by clever inventors. Inkjet computer printers are just such a case. Have you ever wondered why the new inkjet printers are so cheap and the cartridges they require are so expensive? The reason is that the companies who manufacture and sell them intended from the very beginning to hook you with a cheap printer and then rip you off, hopefully for years, with incredibly expensive consumable ink cartridges which they also sell.

They use the plastic injection mold process to create a little, hollow 15-cent cartridge case. They label it and inject 10 cents worth of ink (they no doubt buy in 55 gallon drums) which soaks into a little cube of foam in the cartridge. They pack them and sell finished cartridges wholesale to stores for about $15.00. The consumer pays about $30. The mark-up would embarrass even a pharmaceutical company.

The marketing plan they have adopted is that they will produce inkjet printers that are as good as they can produce and sell them at cost or even below cost to hook consumers on the special proprietary inkjet cartridges that are consumed in those printers. The markup on inkjet cartridges is so high that many current printers can be found where the printer is only 2.5 to 3 times the cost of a cartridge. This is somewhat amazing since new printers come with a set of cartridges. The situation that has developed is that all the major inkjet printer companies have all chosen to follow the cheap printer/expensive cartridge plan. Epson Seiko is a prime example.

The free enterprise system feeds economic shortcuts and the markups on inkjet cartridges is so tempting, that within weeks or months of a new printer coming out, third party "compatible" cartridges are available at half the price of the proprietary version. Ever wonder why there are so many types and shapes of cartridges? The companies don't want to see other printer companies sell those profitable cartridges to their personal customers. Most cartridges won't work in more than one brand of printers for this very reason. They use size and shape to force the use of a certain cartridge with a certain printer.

Well, if your whole marketing plan is dependant upon selling ink cartridges with a giant markup to make up for loss leader pricing on the actual printers and your captive cartridge market is being diverted to cut throat competitors who makes only cartridges, you lay awake nights trying to figure out a way to enforce customer "loyalty".

Even more upsetting to your favorite printer company is the concept of refilling cartridges. One cheap bottle of ink can refill a single cartridge many times and screw up the marketing plan big time. If a lot of people refilled cartridges, the marketing plan is dead . There are many companies who have made a business of selling ink kits to refill cartridges. The web hosts many of them.

I recently, and reluctantly tossed a new black ink cartridge into my shopping cart at Walmart, knowing full well that I was paying a ridiculous price for the actual ink I was buying. I had to buy the darn thing since the little red light was blinking on the face of my printer, warning that I was running on fumes in my black ink cartridge . When you need a hard copy of the patent application you have been writing, $29.00 for the back cartridge is the cost of doing business. Being an "Okie", (born in Oklahoma), and being so tight I squeak when I walk, my wallet still went into shock anyway.

When I got home I pulled the old spent cartridge out of the printer and replaced it with the new one. I used my trusty gram scale, I bought for weighing catalyst, that goes down to 1/10th of gram, to see just how much ink I bought for my $27.00. The old cartridge weighed 24.8 grams and the new one weighed 35.8 grams. that means I paid $27.00 for 11 grams of ink.

Over the year the engineers at the various printer companies tried different shapes and sizes but every time they changed the cartridge footprint, the knock off companies followed suit.

What if you put a cheap microchip on the cartridge that would keep track of ink level and interface with the printer to tell it to refuse to recognize the cartridge if the ink level went up instead of steadily declining? What if the chip counted the number of spurts of ink the printer sprays out and then disables the printer once the cartridge should be empty?

That is just what they did. You will notice a small circular copper colored spot on the edge of an Epson cartridge for the Epson 777 printer. That little chip is designed to prevent both counterfeit cartridges and refilling. Patenting the chip/cartridge combination would prevent or restrict counterfeiting and make the marketing plan work. I looked up U.S. 5,158,377, U.S. 5,221,148 and U.S. 5,421,658. The patents tell the whole story!

Not to be outdone, the cartridge counterfeiters are putting out cartridges with their own chips on them. Reportedly, the chips are not set to disable the printer and will allow refilling. Epson will no doubt sue and the saga goes on......