Coyote Blog

A while back I wrote about the unbelievably egregious price Pitney Bowes charges for the ink cartridges on its mailing machines:

Today I bought what may be the most expensive consumer printer ink available.  We have a small Pitney-Bowes postage meter
that has a little built in ink-jet printer to print out the metered
postage symbol (that sort of red looking stuff that replaces the
stamp).  One of their little print cartridges doesn't last more than at
most a thousand envelopes, which represents at most the
equivalent of 50 pages of text for a normal printer.  For this little
cartridge with its smidgen of ink, I paid $39.99.  At the same time, I
bought two-paks of the HP cartridges I needed (no bargain themselves)
for $25 per cartridge, and these cartridges last for hundreds of
pages.  I can't directly compare the volume of ink, but my sense is
that the P-B cartridge is priced such that it would be over $500 with
an equivalent amount of ink to an HP cartridge.

A reader named Randy Hooker sent me this email, which read in part:

Read your blog post with glee! Almost four years ago I felt the same and developed alternative ink products for many Pitney machines. Our trademarked name is NuPost.
Google that and you'll see there are hundreds of places to buy.

Just as background on the Pitney machines and ink usage: As these meters print "money" rather than images it is critical that the cartridge have ink available at all times.  So, the meter "purges" the print head on a regular basis to insure performance.
This purging uses massive amounts of ink as compared to the printing of a
single indicia.

The Pitney Bowes published output of the cartridge for your machine is 400
to 600 impressions OR 4 months.  If you do not use the meter at all, the purges will exhaust the cartridge over a 4 month period. Infrequent mailers will get very little value from these cartridges, compounding the total cost of ownership.

He was nice enough to send me a sample, which sat on the shelf and I forgot it (sorry).  Then, the other day, I noticed when I ran some mail that the printing looked a lot better than normal - none of bad banding that is typical.  I opened it up and found Randy's cartridge.  This thing is great - its half the price at OfficeMax of the Pitney Bowes cartridge and actually prints better.  Thanks!  (Many online sources of NuPost cartridges here).

Today I bought what may be the most expensive consumer printer ink available.  We have a small Pitney-Bowes postage meter that has a little built in ink-jet printer to print out the metered postage symbol (that sort of red looking stuff that replaces the stamp).  One of their little print cartridges doesn't last more than at most a thousand envelopes, which represents at most the equivalent of 50 pages of text for a normal printer.  For this little cartridge with its smidgen of ink, I paid $39.99.  At the same time, I bought two-paks of the HP cartridges I needed (no bargain themselves) for $25 per cartridge, and these cartridges last for hundreds of pages.  I can't directly compare the volume of ink, but my sense is that the P-B cartridge is priced such that it would be over $500 with an equivalent amount of ink to an HP cartridge.  Insane.  And its worse because the P-B postage meter has this annoying tendency to announce the cartridge is almost out of ink before it is even half empty.  We have gone weeks with the meter telling us the cartridge had to be replaced soon.

I am not sure I fully understand the relationship Pitney-Bowes has to the US Postal Service, but to all appearances, they have been handed a virtual monopoly for decades.  For years business have been forced to pay egregious rental rates for P-B equipment with long, long minimum lease periods because the USPS does not seem to be comfortable with competition.  Only the advent of Internet postage in the late 1990's forced P-B to come out with a small business postage meter that you could purchase at relatively low cost.  I am flabbergasted that the US government continues to give them this monopoly.  It is ironic to me that several of the abusive monopolistic practices used by Pitney-Bowes and encouraged by the US government are the same practices Xerox got busted (under anti-trust litigation) years ago by... the US Government.