Argh! Hewlett Packard and Staples Suck
 

Wasted 35 minutes on the phone trying to get a virtually new and expensive faulty printer cart replaced. Staples say they don't replace faulty carts after 24 hours because people have had time to use them all up and tamper with them. HP say the cart is past it's expiry date -which is printed on the cart itself and not on the packaging, so I need to take it up with Stapes for selling me expired products.

So now I have to rummage around and find the stinking receipt -if i still have it and go back to Staples. But I need to print today and there's no way i'll find the receipt that quickly.

never buy a Hewlett Packard printer -they're worse than bloody lexmark and that's saying something. And their customer service sucks. I'm sat here with an HP computer and an HP printer and they can't even manage to replace a lousy cartridge that has their goddamned brand all over it. there seems to me to be absolutely no reason not to use refills and non-genuine carts if they don't even stand by their superior quality of genuine cartriges bullshit.

Chip resetter?

I think it overrides the pre-programmed refusal to work with non-brand carts.

discussed here:
http://www.cellar.org/showthread.php...ter#post666856

Damn, that sound frustrating as hell. Don't let those slackers at Staples give you any grief. Get in their face!

....our little Lexmark worked great for years and our HP all-in-one hasn't given us even a hiccup yet and its going on 2 years.

I used to buy cartridges at Staples for the HP printer I had. Staples had their own label cartridges, and they worked well. When I put in my last cartridge I'd make a mental note to stop and buy two the next time I went by. Then I put in a cartridge that leaked all over my desk, what a mess. When I took it back they refused to replace it because it had been over 15 days since I bought it.
No more Staples for me.


But I printed well over 20,000 sheets, before I replaced that printer.

It took me quite a few moments to suss out what a "printer cart" could be. I was thinking a little cart with wheels to put a printer on . . .

Yeah, monster tend to abbreviate when she pissed.:haha:

Cloud, I had the same problem, and I'm a nerd!

I used to have a dinky little cart my printer sat on. It would roll back & forth & to & fro when it was printing. I got tired of putting it back every time I printed something.

I didn't see the part that states what your problem was with HP.

I'm sure you'd want to have a legitimate problem with them before trashing their name here publicly.

According to the OP, HP sets an expiration date on their cartridges, but they don't print that expiration date on the outside of the box. The consumer can't tell if the cartridge is expired when they buy it.

Plus, the "expiration date" takes effect even if there's plenty of ink left. If they think you haven't bought a cartridge from them recently enough, they disable your printer.

That's where chip re-setters come in, I don't know if they make one for hp carts though.

Here's one random purveyor:
http://www.chipresetters.com/

HM, you're leaping to conclusions that the expiry date disables the cartridge. You can still EAT expired food, the date just indicates the point at which the materials cannot reasonably be guaranteed to be "good." You can't guarantee that a plastic widget will be functional in 5, 10, or 20 years. Or whatever the timeframe is.

Staples hasn't managed their stock in a responsible fashion. Staples is selling expired products (glatt, see the OP).

All this being said, without a receipt, NOBODY will "take your word" that you bought something somewhere.

Incidentally, was HP supposed to put a new cartridge in their Star Trek transporter and beam it to you?

Neither the clerks at Staples nor the consumer have any idea the product is expired because the expiration date is not printed on the outside of the box. Sure, the manager at Staples should only take shipments on as many cartridges as they expect to sell in a reasonable amount of time, but by not printing the expiration date on the cartridge, the manufacturer must take the most blame here.

It may not apply to monster's particular printer, but I'm leaping nowhere. HP does expire cartridges. According to their site, it's not all of them, and some printers let you override the expiration. Anecdotes here, including multiple people who had their printers work again after removing the battery that lets the printer remember the date.

Also, footfootfoot, Epson didn't come off too great either in my surfing. But the chip resetter would take care of that.

@glatt: I don't mean the customer, clerk, or manager of Staples. It's a coporation. If they don't have appropriate systems in place to track their stock with logical parameters, then they need to either implement these systems, or stop selling products for which it is understood that this will be a problem. Again, all this being said, I'm sure they will still require a receipt to be produced.

@HM: Sorry, I misspoke. I should have said that the information to support the conclusion has not been presented in this thread.

If the "expiration date" does in fact disable the cartridge, then I personally feel that this is wrong, and I personally feel that it is wrong not to print the date on the box. For these reasons I would agree that HP "sucks" in this scenario. However, as to the direct complaint of trying to return a product to where you bought it, HP can't be blamed for Staples return policy. Not unless this constitutes a breach of their licensed reseller contract.

Oh yeah, their policy or strategy is pretty lousy. They practically give away the pritners knowing that they will ream you with the ink cartridges. The pritner takes 6 cartridges @ ~ $12-14 each. The chip doesn't monitor the actual ink used, it monitors the number of times the printer called for ink. Thus, printing out a single . is the same to the chip as printing out a page of solid color. I've reset the same cartridge up to 4 times before it ran out of ink. The other feature of the chip is that it is supposed to prevent re-filling the cartridge. W/o a chip resetter you can refill the cartridge but the printer won't print if it thinks a cartridge is out. You cannot even print a b&w document if cyan is out. The printer stops working.

So, the chip resetter is the thing that makes this printer ok in my book. I still think Epson is a duplicitous company, but I have a work-around.

And all this revelation certainly should result in an apology for being a piss-bucket to monster.

And no one cares what you "personally" feel unless you are "personally" butt-fucking someone in the mouth while you're selling your HP stock.

:lol:

:shock:

No aplogy necessary. She did not explain the basis of having a legitimate problem with HP, simply lumped them in with Staples. I still don't understand how "I need to print today" could be solved over the phone.

The problem turned out to be that the expiration date supposedly disables the cartridge (learned on page two) but even this was covered by HP as a problem with Staples stocking expired product, and, once again, left the only problem being having to produce a receipt to show it was even purchased at Staples.


I make the distinction "personally" because I realize that coprporate policies are not written to suit my "feelings."

Not a solution for Monster, but something to consider for all.

I did a little math a couple of years ago and figured I could save about 10 cents a page printing on a laser printer versus an ink-jet printer. Then I figured out how many pages Mrs. Z and the Zings were printing.

When I tallied it up I could more than pay for a low-end laser printer in less than a year. My experience has been that they are less trouble too.

YMMV

Does that include the cost of setting up and maintaining the tank for the sea bass?

The Laser printers I've used do shitty color pictures.

Keep your cartridge-hogging inkjet for photos only. Set your default printer to your new, document-printing laser printer.

If you have to buy a set of color cartridges to print christmas photos, etc., it won't hurt as much--as a "special occasion."

I don't do enough document printing to justify spending a couple hundred on another printer.

Yeah, if you don't do a lot of B&W it won't make sense for you. That's why I added "YMMV".

I used to be under the impression that Americans abbreviated everything. Not so, I've learned. Aussies do though. srsly? no-one here saya "cart" for cartridge? they always know what i mean in the store and the scripted robot at the call center knew....

The confusion is that the abbreviation is another word. A cart is a thing already.

Whereas, PC LOAD LETTER ...

Right. So never put your printer in the barn. 'Cause of that thing with horses.

Cart. I use it every day. Right now I'm looking at one sitting in my office with a disassembled Ricoh printer on it.