Another Dishonest Ploy from Copier Reps

You may be nearing the end of your copier lease and you are hearing your copier rep sing a song of “bigger, better, at the same price.”  It sounds great at first, after all, why not go faster and be able to do more and if you can do it at the same costs as you currently have, all the better.  Here is the problem, you are probably paying too much for your copier in Denver!

Let’s change the product to illustrate the point.  You go to your local Starwhatever coffee house and let’s say they are charging you $8.00 per cup of coffee.  (It seems like they do sometimes) Anyway, this is way too much, and them promising to give you 32 oz instead of 20 oz does not make the $8.00 cost a good deal.  A good deal is based on fair market value and what you get for that value.

When you are buying a copier in Denver, don’t get suckered into thinking that just because the copier is faster than what you already have for the same price, that the new copier is a good deal.

If you are normal, what just happened is that you signed up to pay 20% – 30% more than you would have had you had the quote itemized. Ask yourself for a moment, why would a rep want to have just 1 number for you to look at?  It is possible they are magnamimous…  sure…  But, more likely, they are padding their margin because “where there’s mystery, there’s margin.”  I don’t make the rules…  Just explaining what happens…

Here are a few ways this could happen.  You may now have a finisher you don’t really need.  It was included.  So, you wonder what a finisher costs…  it is usually $1,000 to $1,500.  Also, you get way more pages than you need so you never go over…  Sounds good in theory, but I hate to be the bearer of bad news…  these are not rollover minutes, you are paying for them.  I had one customer beating me up to try and get their costs down to $.0065 per print like their current provider…  when I looked at what was structured, the copier company was charging $.0065 per print for up to 200,000 pages a quarter.  They only used about 100,000 pages a quarter.  By charging $.009 per print for the actual prints, they saved  $1,000.00 per year.  It seems odd when your price is raised 30% you’d save so much money.  These are some of the tricks the “everything included” model employs.

Be cautious if your copier provider is not spelling out all your costs.  It is generally a bad sign.  They may make you the offer to see all the numbers, if so, they are probably being more fair… if not, you may want to look around a bit more…