The Razor-and-Blades Racket
The Printer Is the Bait. The Cartridge Is the Trap.
Printer makers routinely sell the hardware near or below cost, because the printer isn't the product. It's a lock, sold cheap, that only opens with the one key the manufacturer lets you buy: their cartridge, at whatever markup a captive customer will tolerate. Chips embedded in the cartridge enforce it, rejecting ink you already paid for if it's the wrong brand, the wrong region, or simply not fresh enough for the manufacturer's taste.
Where the markup actually lives
Global ink and toner market
A rough, order-of-magnitude estimate of annual worldwide cartridge sales.
How the lock-in works
The Razor-and-Blades Model, Perfected
The printer is a loss leader. Manufacturers can afford to sell the hardware for less than it costs to make because every page printed afterward buys more ink, and the ink is where the money is. It's the same logic as a razor sold cheap so you keep buying blades, just applied to a machine you can't use at all once the "blade" runs out.
Ink Priced Like Perfume, Sold Like a Commodity
Consumer Reports and other outlets have repeatedly measured inkjet cartridge cost-per-ounce figures that beat luxury perfume and champagne. The fluid itself is mostly water, dye or pigment, and a bit of glycol, none of it justifying the price, but there is nowhere else to buy it once you own the printer it's chipped to fit.
Chips That Reject Ink You Already Paid For
Cartridges carry an authentication chip the printer checks before it will print. That chip can refuse third-party or remanufactured ink outright, refuse genuine cartridges bought in a different region than the printer, and in some product lines refuse cartridges the manufacturer has simply decided are "too old," regardless of how much usable ink remains inside.
The Firmware Update That Bricked Working Printers
In 2016, HP pushed a firmware update that sat dormant for months, then activated later that year to start rejecting non-HP cartridges in printers that had been working fine with them for years. The backlash was large enough that HP apologized and pushed a rollback, and the practice, marketed as "Dynamic Security," later drew a class-action lawsuit that HP settled. The lesson manufacturers took was not "stop doing this," it was "disclose it in the fine print first."
Ink Subscriptions That Can Brick the Printer, Not Just the Cartridge
Subscription programs like HP Instant Ink bill monthly for a page allotment instead of per cartridge, which sounds like a better deal. But the printer stays connected to the manufacturer's servers to enforce it, and cancel the subscription and some models stop printing entirely, even with ink physically loaded, because authorization to print, not ink, is the thing actually being metered.
Regulators Have Named the Practice
The FTC's 2021 report to Congress on repair restrictions, "Nixing the Fix," specifically called out cartridge authentication chips as a textbook anti-repair tactic: a manufacturer using digital locks to block a repair or a refill that would otherwise work fine. Right-to-repair laws now on the books in several US states aim at the same family of locks, but none of them yet ban chip-based consumable authentication outright.
What we can do
Phase 1: Require cost-per-page or cost-per-milliliter disclosure at the point of sale, the ink-and-toner equivalent of an Energy Star label, so the true cost of ownership is visible before purchase, not discovered at the first refill. Phase 2: Establish a "right to refill": ban firmware or chip locks that reject functioning, non-counterfeit ink solely for being third-party, remanufactured, or from a different region. Phase 3: Require that canceling a print subscription degrade the printer to basic offline printing with a loaded cartridge, not disable it outright, the same durability principle behind right-to-repair laws applied to how these devices fail.
Sources: FTC, "Nixing the Fix: An FTC Report to Congress on Repair Restrictions" (2021); Consumer Reports ink cost-per-page testing; contemporaneous reporting on HP's 2016 "Dynamic Security" firmware update and the resulting class-action settlement (Ars Technica, The Verge); The Repair Association (repair.org). This page is closely related to enshitification-style lock-in, but the printer/cartridge pricing structure predates it and works even without a software "update" degrading anything.
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