Are You Getting Screwed by Your Copier?

Used ricoh aficio 3035I’ve got an extra copier right now. It’s sitting in a hallway waiting to go to copier heaven.

It’s leased.

It’s a perfectly fine copier with all the cool gizmos and gadgets. It’s done a great job for us. We just don’t need it anymore (it’s left over from our recent office reorganization).

We can’t get rid of it. We can’t sell it. We can’t sublease it. We can’t give it back. No one wants it.

We’re stuck with it.

Well, that’s not entirely true.

We can give it back to the copier people now, 10 months before the lease expires.

But if we give it back, we’ll pay about $1,000 more than we’re going to pay by keeping it and paying the lease payments for the next 10 months.

We looked into buying out the lease and selling it ourselves.

We found that identical copiers on Craigslist are selling for less than the payoff on our copier.

We’re screwed.

We made such a bad deal on the copier and on the lease that we’re still underwater 10 months before a 48-month lease ends.

We made a really bad deal.

Why?

Well, I guess I’m just stupid. I accept that. I was in a hurry. We needed a new copier. This is what the guy said to do, so we did it.

Have you ever handled the divorce of a copier guy? These guys make a freaking fortune (and they seem to get divorced like crazy). They sell copiers, and they make like $150,000 and up.

Why?

I’ll tell you why. Because they are good at what they do. My copier in the hallway is Exhibit A in that case.

I’ll be much more careful next time.

In fact, I may not buy another $15,000 copier (or lease it either).

We’ll likely stop with the whole copier concept and move toward using our scanners and high-volume printers instead of the copier model. The scanners and printers are cheaper (no salesperson involved) and don’t require weekly visits from the service guy. I have a strong feeling that we’re headed to a post-copier era.

That copier is going to sit in the hall for 10 months reminding me of its existence. I’ll have to learn to cope.

Need a copier?

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  • Julie K

    We email or share PDFs through our case management program as much as possible. And for large paper mailings we burn a CD. Now if the courts would all go paperless, we could really lose the printers. We can tab with bookmarks, bates number, OCR and set the initial view in Acrobat allowing for much more efficient use of the documents. Love the new MacBook Air in the paperless office!

  • Drew Richards

    Our old copier is sitting in one of our bathrooms, collecting dust. The new copier company bought out our existing lease, but the leasing company refuses to let us return it. Sigh. 

  • http://www.GrahamLawCollaborative.com Kimberly

    I’m not getting screwed by my copier, currently.  But I’ve been there, done that already.  Never ever again would I lease a copier. 

    Thankfully it does still work, over 2 years after the lease was over and bought out.  And it “only” cost me about $300 to buy out the lease.  It’s still working.  (knock wood)

    I’m going mostly paperless.  I now have a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M, and couldn’t possibly be happier with it.  

  • http://www.legalmatterssoftware.com John Ryan

    Other then the expense of a copier the better reason to switch to scanners and printers is the effeciency. Everytime you copy instead of scanning you have wasted that staff resources, as you don’t have that information in  electronic form. Because of the price also you would tend to have only a few copiers compared to printers on every desk, so people have to get up and go to ”the copier”. It’s like a large magnet that attracts staff, have you ever called in for your paralegal to be told they are at the copier? You rarely hear they are at the printer because if you heard that a couple of times you would buy another printer.    

  • http://twitter.com/cfulmer cfulmer

    Lee: You should call up the copier people, tell them “We’re not using this.  We’ll be happy to pay out the rest of the term now if you take it.”  That’s a win-win for everybody: you get your space back, and they get a copier that they can then turn around and sell on Craigslist.

    But, be sure to completely erase any hard drive that copier has; it could have images of previously copied pages.

    • http://divorcediscourse.com Lee Rosen

      Tried it. They want all the payments plus $1,000. No deal.

      Thanks.

      Lee

  • Megan C. Hunt

    Funny you should ask…..our copier got struck by lightning (through the fax line) during a storm over the weekend.  But the new one has already been ordered :)

    • http://divorcediscourse.com Lee Rosen

      Wow. That’s awful. On another note, what are you still doing with a fax line?
      Lee

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