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> They're one of the first entrepreneurialist ventures to be developed in developing countries

That does not mean that they survive.

> Okay, you might live in a cabin 200 miles away from the nearest town.

In Poland such places are mostly gone (some survive near universities) as nearly everyone has printer accessible at home or at work.

Some are at places where people need printing (government offices) but charge massive fees.

> all over the world

World is more varied than you expect.

> Every Internet cafe offers printing.

Not present anymore in Poland

> Every parcel shipping store (UPS, FedEx, etc.) offers printing

No such thing in Poland and closest equivalent does not offer printing as service (exceptions may apply).

Exactly this. Also:

>> Every parcel shipping store (UPS, FedEx, etc.) offers printing

> No such thing in Poland and closest equivalent does not offer printing as service (exceptions may apply).

While there are "parcel points" in Poland, I've never seen them advertising a document printing service, and they're also being rapidly displaced by the spread of Paczkomaty - automated self-service parcel collection and sending booths.

> While there are "parcel points" in Poland

All that I have seen are extra service of kiosk/greengocer/fuel station - not an independent location.

Yes, but you're not addressing the thrust of the argument. Certainly print shops don't exist in Poland, but that doesn't mean that getting prints done is inconvenient in Poland if you don't have your own printer.

In sufficiently-developed countries like Poland, you don't need print shops, but it's not because "nearly everyone has printer accessible at home or at work." (That's not even true; many people don't have color printers either at home or at work!)

Print shops never existed for the sake of making one print or one copy; the way they made their money was commercial, volume printing. Sign printing; poster printing; flyer printing; etc. "Consumer" printing/copying was always a side-business.

No matter how developed your city, commercial print shops still need to exist, because consumer printers just aren't up to the task of producing thousands of pages per hour, reliably, day-in-day-out; and because there's real labor involved in collating and feeding all that paper. Especially for weird paper shapes that need cutting (e.g. business cards.)

No, the reason Poland doesn't have consumer print shops, is because the commercial printers (and package services) who used to offer walk-in consumer printing as a convenience service, have been out-competed in that space by the lower margins offered by online document/photo print-and-deliver services (who can serve Polish customers from anywhere in the EU very cheaply, and so don't need to have a local presence in Poland.)

> that doesn't mean that getting prints done is inconvenient in Poland if you don't have your own printer.

It is inconvenient in Poland as there is no easy to use way to get your stuff printed.

There are some print shops, but focusing on specialist/large prints - and just few of them in a city, definitely not on every corner. Printing a single A4 page would cost me about 5% of printer cost (travel cost, printing itself, time of travel).

> Shops offering printing-as-a-service are one of the most common things found in every small town, all over the world.

FWIW, I live in the outer suburbs of Melbourne in Australia. By no means a small town. It’s a 20min drive to my closest place that does printing, which is apparently out in an industrial estate. There’s absolutely nothing in the 3-4 most accessible shopping/retail areas. These types of places have been shrinking with every passing year.

I'm in Tasmania's second largest city, Launceston.

The closest printing shop with extended hours, which I need because I'm just a lowly blue collar working who needs to work 12 hour days to make ends meet, is Officeworks, and there's exactly one of those here and it's 8 kilometres from my house and shuts at 7pm.

I'll just use my second hand Brother colour laser, cheers.

Or, presuming you don’t work 7 day weeks, you could just go during working hours on the weekend.

Again, who needs glossy photo prints with a 24 hour deadline? What for?

Six day weeks, leaves me with Saturday afternoon and Sunday.

Does it bother you that much if I’m ok maintaining a colour laser printer myself because I want to have it handy for the Hangul of times a month I want to use it.

I think it's reasonable if you're using it multiple times a month.

I know my use case pattern is something like "oh shit, I have to print [a form/some homework-type presentation]" closer to once a year.

> glossy photo prints with a 24 hour deadline? What for?

Why do you assume that’s the /only/ thing someone would want printed? Quite odd, considering the declining popularity of print photos.

Because this thread is about buying a simple B&W laser printer for its reliability, and how that removes the option of printing photos (which is something people sometimes try to do at home), but retains the option to print pretty much anything else[1] people try to print at home.

And then, as a tangent, this is a subthread about using printing services to substitute for the rare — and as you say, declining! — use-case of printing photos, which, when you realize that that's possible, makes the calculus of "buying a simple B&W laser printer for its reliability" much more clear.

[1] (It also removes the option to print e.g. color flyers or posters or business cards, but people don't generally try to do any of those at home anyway, instead deferring to a commercial printer to 1. get a high-quality result, and 2. not have to buy dozens of ink cartridges and spend hours fighting their printer to get a thousand flyers out of it.)

I too am in Australia, but 15 minute drive into a small town without a print shop. Perhaps Australia is a oddity, and most people/places worldwide do in fact have easy access to a local print shop, but I am guessing the grandparent is seeing things from the perspective of a north American and in my experience it is a relative safe bet that the north American experience does not usually translate to the rest of the world where the majority of people live.

FWIW my 20% number was pulled out of the air and based on very rough knowledge of HNs userbase.

Where I live in Asia, every convenience store (in any decently sized city, 24 hours and a 5 minute walk) and any major supermarket has a copier/printer. The convenience store ones also tend to have for-pay online features (photo prints of K-pop/J-pop idols, music scores to print)

> I am guessing the grandparent is seeing things from the perspective of a North American

No, I’m basing this on extensive travel experience in Africa, South America, and South Asia. If a town has anything resembling a hostel, then it is also 100% likely to have a copy shop or an Internet cafe with a printer.

—————

I think the actual failure of shared model here, is that there are people here who think something being 20 minutes away by car is “inconvenient.”

Folks, where I used to live, the nearest thing other than a farmstead was an hour away by car. And I still would have had my photos printed in town rather than owning a shitty inkjet printer (that would have been used so little that it would have required maintenance before every print.)

Driving 20mins in a polluting case, just to print a few pages? I think you’re the one missing some perspective here…

I said "20 minutes by car"; I didn't say driving. Americans like to measure things in by-car distances. What I meant was "an hour's walk" or "45 minutes by bicycle."

I didn't own a car where I used to live. Whenever I needed anything in town, I walked two hours to town. (When I eventually got a bicycle, it was a big upgrade!) And this was convenience to me.

Many people, in many places in the world, live this way. It is a uniquely-first-world perspective to think that "living far from town" means living in some self-sufficient "own one of everything you need" farmstead/mansion. For most people, in most of the world, living far from town just means commuting to town, on foot, all the dang time.

People in most of the rural parts of India, or Nigeria, or China, still commute on foot to a town-center-ish area to get water. Together, that makes up most of the population of the world! You think these people should own color printers? When they only barely have electricity? No; in the rare, rare case that such a person would need to get a physical photo printed, they'd walk however long it took to get to "the big city", and from there, they'd go to a dang print shop.

Honestly, I think people are having a severe failure of imagination in this thread, if they think that the various different kinds of developed nation that HN users live in, collectively make up "80% of the world."

Yes, what you say is true. I come from South Asia, and I live in NL, so I fully understand this perspective.

But rather, in the scope of this discussion, having a printer at home when you can afford one, makes a lot of sense from a cost/time angle.

But for most of the world, the cost calculus doesn't work out, because inkjet printers are shitty and break down, and use up their super-expensive color cartridges to print B&W prints. (And laser printers don't work well in humid climates, so good luck using a color laser.)

It's the same reason that in most of the world, you don't see people using those shaving razors with disposable razor-blade cartridges. They're too expensive over time, compared to a straight-razor / safety razor that can be sharpened.

If you only ever need to print, say, five photos in your entire life, it's fine if each one takes a three-hour round-trip walk to town and the equivalent of a day's wages. That'll still be lower TCO than printing every B&W text report you ever need to print on a color inkjet, and so needing to feed it a new yellow cartridge every few months just so it can keep putting microdots on the paper.

Nobody is advocating this for people who can’t afford it. We’re talking about those who can and do need to print often.

I don’t know why we need to argue on about the poorest people who can’t afford it? Sounds like a rhetorical discussion honestly.

20 minutes by car has a lower carbon output that one ink cartridge (which is about the consumption when you realize once a year that you need to print something and the old cartridge has the yellow nozzle dried out)

Why are we discussing this situation for people who only print once a year? That sounds like an absurd premise.

There’s lots of inkjets now that don’t suck, and don’t need much opex or capex. Some don’t need cartridges, they have refillable containers.

I was just looking into this for while I'm on vacation next week in Wisconsin (or perhaps not, given delta), and the nearest printing place is about a 20 minute drive away. But then, because I do a lot of writing and prefer to edit on paper, I'm probably on the right side of the bell curve when it comes to printer usage.

To be clear, what we're discussing in this thread, are the options of:

• own a simple, reliable black-and-white laser printer for printing text; go to a print shop for fancy color-glossy prints

• own a fancy, unreliable color inkjet printer, and use it for both simple black-and-white text prints and photo prints

Nobody's suggesting not owning any printer at all.

Is there a library nearby? They probably do printing.

I really didnt want to start a big discussion about this... but I just can't help myself, so i will dig in.

You're actually missing my main point. It really isn't about Staples, or North American vs the world, print quality, or preferences for B&W vs colour.

My main point is this: Don't fall into the trap of thinking your life experience always maps well to eveyone else you interact with in life.

I realize that. And that was the point I was trying to contradict: that you shouldn't make arguments about life experience either way, without having quite a lot of it. Because sometimes, a thing that you might intuitively think is one of those "only rich North American people have it" things is actually something possessed by the vast majority of the world, and so is a very bad example — a counterexample, in fact — of people being in different life situations.

> you shouldn't make arguments about life experience either way

These two arguments are not equivalent. Mathematically speaking, one side has to find just 20+% counter examples and the "vast majority" argument crumbles.

This thread has so many different people, from different parts of the world chiming in to say "this is not my lived experience", and you are still digging in to say "I'm right, the vast majority fit this mould".

I'm not sure my little hole-in-the-wall Deutsche Post shop offers printing.