Our home color printer, an HP Photosmart 8250 will soon have its seventh birthday. In inkjet printer years, that’s positively ancient. Prior to that I’ve never had an inkjet printer last more than three years; I had a dot-matrix printer that lasted more than ten, but that was in the 1980s, when dinosaurs ruled the earth.

This HP was also relatively expensive too, as printers for the home market go. Although bear in mind that printer companies subscribe to the same marketing philosophy of razor manufacturers, who pioneered the concept of selling the razor handle cheap and making all the money on replacement blades: home printers are sold inexpensively, because all the profit comes from selling ink cartridges.

Until, of course, the day comes when you can’t find them anywhere.

Costco, where I used to get them, dropped HP’s 02-type cartridges from their shelves over a year ago, and now they’ve disappeared from my local Walmart and Staples stores.

At the moment, I can still find official HP print cartridges on Amazon.ca, but the question is: for how long? Until then, I still need them.

I can understand retailers no longer stocking print cartridges once the manufacturer stops producing them, but given that there are still legacy printers out there that require support, not stocking in-production cartridges, even for a seven year old printer, seems short sighted.

After all, not only am I not the only one who needs them, if you stock them, that’s going to get me into your store, and there’s an excellent chance that if I’m there anyway I’ll probably buy something else at the same time.

In this case, ceding your retail bricks and mortar business to Amazon.ca smacks of giving up.

I already buy plenty of stuff on Amazon, like many people. As a retailer you really don’t want to give us customers any more reason to shop online more than we already do.

For a category managers, don’t just look at the number of turns you can make on 02 or any other older printer cartridges, ask yourself, are they still profitable, and will they lure traffic into your stores? The answer to both those questions is yes.