Another Dirty Little Secret — Include Everything!

So you are buying a copier and it is getting pretty crazy with all the different quotes coming in and you are just wishing this would be easier…  You see a quote which has a price like $324.00 per month including everything.  Wow, how simple is that?  Seems like a decent deal, some are cheaper, but they have all these overages, etc…  I just want to know what I have to pay each month, you think…  so this looks good and you sign the lease… So, what just happened here from a copier reps perspective?

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…