> Shops offering printing-as-a-service are one of the most common things found in every small town, all over the world.
FWIW, I live in the outer suburbs of Melbourne in Australia. By no means a small town. It’s a 20min drive to my closest place that does printing, which is apparently out in an industrial estate. There’s absolutely nothing in the 3-4 most accessible shopping/retail areas. These types of places have been shrinking with every passing year.
I'm in Tasmania's second largest city, Launceston.
The closest printing shop with extended hours, which I need because I'm just a lowly blue collar working who needs to work 12 hour days to make ends meet, is Officeworks, and there's exactly one of those here and it's 8 kilometres from my house and shuts at 7pm.
I'll just use my second hand Brother colour laser, cheers.
Six day weeks, leaves me with Saturday afternoon and Sunday.
Does it bother you that much if I’m ok maintaining a colour laser printer myself because I want to have it handy for the Hangul of times a month I want to use it.
Because this thread is about buying a simple B&W laser printer for its reliability, and how that removes the option of printing photos (which is something people sometimes try to do at home), but retains the option to print pretty much anything else[1] people try to print at home.
And then, as a tangent, this is a subthread about using printing services to substitute for the rare — and as you say, declining! — use-case of printing photos, which, when you realize that that's possible, makes the calculus of "buying a simple B&W laser printer for its reliability" much more clear.
[1] (It also removes the option to print e.g. color flyers or posters or business cards, but people don't generally try to do any of those at home anyway, instead deferring to a commercial printer to 1. get a high-quality result, and 2. not have to buy dozens of ink cartridges and spend hours fighting their printer to get a thousand flyers out of it.)
I too am in Australia, but 15 minute drive into a small town without a print shop. Perhaps Australia is a oddity, and most people/places worldwide do in fact have easy access to a local print shop, but I am guessing the grandparent is seeing things from the perspective of a north American and in my experience it is a relative safe bet that the north American experience does not usually translate to the rest of the world where the majority of people live.
FWIW my 20% number was pulled out of the air and based on very rough knowledge of HNs userbase.
Where I live in Asia, every convenience store (in any decently sized city, 24 hours and a 5 minute walk) and any major supermarket has a copier/printer. The convenience store ones also tend to have for-pay online features (photo prints of K-pop/J-pop idols, music scores to print)
> I am guessing the grandparent is seeing things from the perspective of a North American
No, I’m basing this on extensive travel experience in Africa, South America, and South Asia. If a town has anything resembling a hostel, then it is also 100% likely to have a copy shop or an Internet cafe with a printer.
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I think the actual failure of shared model here, is that there are people here who think something being 20 minutes away by car is “inconvenient.”
Folks, where I used to live, the nearest thing other than a farmstead was an hour away by car. And I still would have had my photos printed in town rather than owning a shitty inkjet printer (that would have been used so little that it would have required maintenance before every print.)
I said "20 minutes by car"; I didn't say driving. Americans like to measure things in by-car distances. What I meant was "an hour's walk" or "45 minutes by bicycle."
I didn't own a car where I used to live. Whenever I needed anything in town, I walked two hours to town. (When I eventually got a bicycle, it was a big upgrade!) And this was convenience to me.
Many people, in many places in the world, live this way. It is a uniquely-first-world perspective to think that "living far from town" means living in some self-sufficient "own one of everything you need" farmstead/mansion. For most people, in most of the world, living far from town just means commuting to town, on foot, all the dang time.
People in most of the rural parts of India, or Nigeria, or China, still commute on foot to a town-center-ish area to get water. Together, that makes up most of the population of the world! You think these people should own color printers? When they only barely have electricity? No; in the rare, rare case that such a person would need to get a physical photo printed, they'd walk however long it took to get to "the big city", and from there, they'd go to a dang print shop.
Honestly, I think people are having a severe failure of imagination in this thread, if they think that the various different kinds of developed nation that HN users live in, collectively make up "80% of the world."
But for most of the world, the cost calculus doesn't work out, because inkjet printers are shitty and break down, and use up their super-expensive color cartridges to print B&W prints. (And laser printers don't work well in humid climates, so good luck using a color laser.)
It's the same reason that in most of the world, you don't see people using those shaving razors with disposable razor-blade cartridges. They're too expensive over time, compared to a straight-razor / safety razor that can be sharpened.
If you only ever need to print, say, five photos in your entire life, it's fine if each one takes a three-hour round-trip walk to town and the equivalent of a day's wages. That'll still be lower TCO than printing every B&W text report you ever need to print on a color inkjet, and so needing to feed it a new yellow cartridge every few months just so it can keep putting microdots on the paper.
20 minutes by car has a lower carbon output that one ink cartridge (which is about the consumption when you realize once a year that you need to print something and the old cartridge has the yellow nozzle dried out)
I was just looking into this for while I'm on vacation next week in Wisconsin (or perhaps not, given delta), and the nearest printing place is about a 20 minute drive away. But then, because I do a lot of writing and prefer to edit on paper, I'm probably on the right side of the bell curve when it comes to printer usage.
FWIW, I live in the outer suburbs of Melbourne in Australia. By no means a small town. It’s a 20min drive to my closest place that does printing, which is apparently out in an industrial estate. There’s absolutely nothing in the 3-4 most accessible shopping/retail areas. These types of places have been shrinking with every passing year.