I’ll start: printers.
I bought an HP in March 2020 when my job went remote and HP bricked it remotely after only 100 pages because I wouldn’t sign up for their subscription program. Ended up trashing a perfectly good printer.
Luckily my library’s close by and I can print there remotely.
Separating a printer and a cartridge in this scenario is also arbitrary.
It’s normalised because it’s printer and it’s always shady, but imagine it’s like that with any other thing you have. Imagine Ford decides that from now on, you need to pay $700 per month to them on top of the price of a car you already paid, but they in exchange allow you to fill up at their gas stations couple of times per month. Now imagine you just got full tank and stopped paying subscription. Your car immediately shuts down, wheels blocked, dead in the water. You now need to replace the whole gas tank, fuel lines, and part of the engine, and buy some on some market and get it installed (but don’t worry, they made it easily replaceable). Those that you had are unusable, if you put it in other car it stops working, and if you try to syphon the gas the whole thing explodes.
If we go back to the printers, a printer without a cartridge doesn’t exist, so if a perfectly physically working product (a printer with a cartridge full of ink) you had, stops working until you give company more money on top of already paid money, it’s indefensible no matter how you spin it.
The answer literally says “we bricked your device, but if you pay us more money and buy a spare part for it, we will unbrick it”. It’s extortion.
If I buy subscription for whatever, let’s say food, they deliver me first month of food, and I cancel subscription, I have reasonable expectations that I still can eat my food and it doesn’t spontaneously combusts.
No. This would be like if you bought a Ford. Opted into the voluntary subscription. Let’s say it’s 350$. It lets you fill up your gas tank once a week. If you were to fill out up without that it would cost 450$. Let’s say half way through the month you cancel your subscription. The gas in your tank needs to be replaced. It’s a 2 minute job to siphon it, and you immediately can replace it with more expensive gas. But the truck works fine without the sub.
Then you go online and bitch that the gas costs more, and your truck had to be refilled with more expensive gas before it worked again. So you instead choose not to buy the gas and you blame the subscription for bricking your truck. Because you opted into a fully voluntary program and got used to it.
The scenario you described will still be an insane anti-consumer scam if it was true. The real scam is worse, but how can you be OK with what you described is already insane.
I just don’t recommend doing subscriptions. I don’t really recommend HP either. I prefer brother printers, but they all suck. And again, it’s really not a scam. It’s a way for people that print a lot to save money. I don’t understand how people don’t understand the basics of these types of programs. But hey, you get angry all you want. It’s no skin off my back, and I refuse to service home users anyways, because it’s a pain in the ass regardless what tech they own.
It’s not a scam in a sense that the rules are kinda explained. It’s a scammy behaviour by a scammy company however.