I find it fascinating that people are ready to go through such lengths to achieve what is supposed to be a simple task and they think it is normal.
If they were testing this with the customers, really not one said this is just plain stupid or maybe they did, but greedy marketers decided to ignore?
It's not like HP has a monopoly on printers?
I would think this study with suffer from a pretty obvious case of the hawthorne effect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
And a sample size orders of magnitude higher would be necessary to negate that, or even be significant to a "universal" scale.
I used this a few times in Chicago. Always found it was easier to use mass transit to get around in town, and cheaper to use legacy renters for longer trips to see the family (100mi+ roundtrip). I assumed they would benefit grocery gap neighborhoods, but cars tended to cluster in places with high competition & logistical substitutes.
Is their service more commonly used inter-city in Europe? I always thought intra-city driving was more of a hassle than in the states.
-Connect printer to the internet
-add a credit card to the account the ink came with
-Create a new account since I did not 'own' the account associated with the cartridges in hand
-wait 5 business days for new cartridges that were linked to my account, even though the ones installed were full.
rent seeking in the form of antiquated document acceptance policies