Officials who regulate weights and measures for states are preparing for a showdown with manufacturers over how ink cartridges are labeled.
Kansas City, Mo. — An ounce of filet mignon can cost you $1 at your grocery store — and the butcher won’t hesitate to quote you the price.
But the cost of ink for your computer’s printer? It can rival the cost of caviar — and you won’t be able to pin down the price because the companies that make those expensive little cartridges don’t want to tell you how much ink they contain.
Consumer advocates’ push for more information has been getting some attention lately, setting up a showdown between regulators and cartridge manufacturers over how the cartridges are labeled.
Manufacturers of printer cartridges say they aren’t required to follow laws such as the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act, so they usually don’t say how much ink is in a cartridge. They prefer instead to estimate how many pages your printer will churn out before you need to replace the cartridge.
That irks consumer advocates, who question why cartridges can cost $30, $40 or more while containing only a fraction of an ounce of ink that, on its own, costs the manufacturer less than $1. In addition, they say, the tests that produce the page-printing estimates have their own problems. At the very least, adding the ink volume information would be useful for consumers wanting to make comparisons.
Now the National Conference on Weights and Measures, a group of state weights and measures officials, plans to take up the issue at its meeting this month in Nashville.
A decision by that body can have effects across the country.
“It’s time to sort all of this out,” said Max Gray, chief of Florida’s Bureau of Weights and Measures, who originally submitted the issue to the national group.
The industry has already told weights and measures officials they can expect a fight. Lexmark International Inc., one company that sells the cartridges, argued in a recent letter that disclosing ink volumes would actually be misleading to consumers.
