I got an email from a printer manufacture offering free a free printer. This sounded great until you look at the whole program. The fine print says you have to buy the consumables, ink or toner from them for a set amount of time. The consumables end up costing you more than the printer would cost over the life of the program in the long run. I don’t understand how the printer makers justify that? I saw a canon inkjet that I could buy for $45 but replacement ink was $49. This means I could go buy a new printer every time my printer runs out of ink and still spend less money. Never mind the pile I create at my local landfill, or the waste of resources it is to build these cheap printers. Of course the other end of this issue is that now ink and toner are listed as toxic waste so throwing away my cartridge is a federal offense. All of this comes back to a problem with the premise that these things are free. Free almost always comes back to me as cost deferred.