I expected that buying my own printer would mean making the ultimate step into “serious” adulthood. No more procrastinating for a week until I made my way to the copy shop. Finally, I could hit “Print” and my work would get done.
Well, it turns out printing is just as painful as it was 20 years ago when I spent hours troubleshooting driver software, crying about being out of yellow ink on a school night. Last week I spent two hours on the phone with HP tech support, reconfiguring my WiFi router so that I could connect my ten-month-old printer to my laptop. Printing really sucks. Can you relate?
Let’s just take a look at the elephant in the room. Printing is universally a painful experience, whether you’re a nomad who goes to the copy shop every six months, a traveler applying for a new visa, a mom who asks their husband to print something out at work for her, or a business owner whose printer just shot out an error code. We’re too busy for this.
Printer manufacturers and copy shop companies have taken our money and stood by as we trudge forward, one foot in the smartphone age and the other in the 1980’s. Printing is an outdated, expensive and time-consuming chore, and Epson is not going to solve this problem for us.
In an age where one click gets a beach towel shipped to my doorstep within a day or two, traditional printing feels more and more like a horse-and-buggy process. At the end of the day, all I want to worry about is getting my printout. End of story. The solution? Two-day delivery of any printout job, anywhere.
On top of being more convenient, a centralized print center can save tons of energy compared to the costs of individuals storing printers and paper at their homes. This is the future I want to live in.