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As noted on the sidebar under “Store Information & Hours” we will be closed this coming Sunday, the 4th of July.

However, since all of our suppliers will be closed on Monday, the 5th, we will be working a shorter day. We will be open Monday from 9am to 2pm.

We apologize if this inconveniences you. Should you have an emergency need for a cartridge after 2pm, please call and let us know. If at all possible we’ll stay open for you or deliver it if it meets the criteria for delivery.

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We will be open on Monday, May 31st, for at least 5 hours, 9AM to 2PM.

Most of our vendors will be closed Monday and quite a few of our customers have indicated they will be enjoying the 3-day weekend, so if it proves to be a slow sales day we’ll close at 2PM.

Should you need us to remain open longer or need a delivery on Monday after 2PM, please let us know before Noon on Monday.

We hope you and your loved ones enjoy the Memorial Day weekend. We’ll return to our regular store hours on Tuesday the 1st of June.

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Just a reminder that we will be closed on Sunday, April 4th, Easter Sunday.

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Image by Jared Klett via Flickr

A customer the other day asked if we would go out of business if the major printer manufacturers developed a printer that didn’t use ink or toner.

I told him that no, we would be in no danger of going out of business. We know this because the inkless printing “revolution” began around two years ago and has yet to make any significant impact on consumers.

Zink is perhaps the best known application of inkless printing. Polaroid has also explored the concept of printing without ink. For an overview of how inkless printing works, check out howstuffworks.com.

The problem with the current state of inkless printing is the very thing that makes it possible, the paper. Just about anywhere you go in America there is a store that sells ink and/or toner cartridges. No matter where you live you can buy paper for your printer. But what happens if you’re in need of the special ink-embossed paper for your inkless printer and the only way you can get it is on the internet. No major problem if you’re at home. But what if you’re on vacation or visiting relatives? Will the supplier ship to a temporary address? How long will you have to stay in one place in order to get the paper shipped to you?

And what if the majority of printing you do is receipts, recipes and email? Is it worth paying a premium price for ink-embedded paper for those mundane tasks?

Also consider the inkless printer. Most of the designs envision a 4″x6″ form factor, meaning if you want to make an 8.5″x11″ print you’ll need to export your images to a flash memory card and transfer them to a full-sized printer.

Inkless printing may indeed be the future but it’s not ready for primetime just yet. Even when it is, many users will be sticking to their “old fashioned” ink and toner printers for quite a while. We see this in technology every day. Windows XP is still the most popular version of the Windows operating system in use today even though two newer versions, Vista and Windows 7, have been introduced since XP was released. Many individuals and businesses operate on the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” principle. They’ve gotten used to XP and see no compelling reason to upgrade, especially when that requires buying newer hardware and having to reinstall programs.

CWSD will be supporting those who are still using ink and toner printers for many years to come. We still have customers using some of the very first HP laser printers designed for home use.

If anything our customer base is growing rapidly. Last year was our most profitable year yet, and this year is starting off just as strong. Businesses that once were content to pay for expensive service contracts with office supply stores or printer manufacturers have had to re-examine their budgets and face the fact that they can no longer justify paying a premium price for something that they could just as easily buy from us without sacrificing quality yet save 35% or more in cost.

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As mentioned in a previous post, we recently had to raise some of our prices to reflect the increases in ink and laser cartridge prices charged to us by our suppliers.

We understand that while these prices still reflect a substantial savings over buying OEM cartridges, any price increase is unwelcome. We are attempting to help offset the impact of those increases by introducing our “Buy 4 Get 1 Free” sale.

Buy any four remanufactured or refilled cartridges and you will receive a fifth cartridge of equal or lesser value absolutely free.

Feel free to mix and match; buy three ink cartridges and one laser cartridge, buy two ink and two laser cartridges, buy four laser cartridges and get an ink cartridge free. As long as you are buying refilled and remanufactured cartridges you can combine them in any quantity and style and you’ll still receive the fifth cartridge of equal or lesser value free.

(Please note: this offer cannot be used in conjunction with any other discount or sale)

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We’ve been made aware of an odd bug in the “Driving Directions” page on our site.

If the directions you get when you enter an address East of our store include “Turn left at Rolfe Rd” after turning onto Clairemont Mesa Blvd. West, you should ignore that. I cannot figure out why Google wants you to turn there, but it’s totally unnecessary.

Whether you are turning onto Clairemont Mesa Blvd. from Interstate 15, 163 or 805, all you need to do is take Clairemont Mesa Blvd. West until you get to 3952-H. Once you’re on Clairemont Mesa Blvd., no other turns are necessary until you reach our location.

I apologize for any confusion this may have caused. The bug is on Google’s side. There’s no way for us to edit the directions provided.

Even our replacement ink, manufactured by Cartridge World specifically for its franchise locations, costs us over $100 a gallon.

Now the price of ink is increasing again, and while we regret having to do this, we are finding it necessary to slightly increase our prices to cover the additional cost.

Up until now we have been able to keep the majority of our prices static for the six years we’ve been open. Even as costs were increasing we preferred to reduce profit margins rather than raise prices. We could afford to do that because of the increased volume of sales we were enjoying, due in large part to the word-of-mouth recommendations from our current customers.

But now we’ve reached a point where we simply have to add a dollar or two to the price of a wider range of our cartridges just to cover the cost of materials.

We still offer a substantial savings over the cost of OEM cartridges from an office supply store or directly from the printer manufacturer. There’s simply no need to pay for your printer over again every time you buy a round of cartridges.

Not only do we offer you cartridges that are guaranteed to work to your satisfaction but we offer you a savings of between 30 and 50% off retail prices, depending on the cartridges you purchase.

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Christmas Eve (Dec. 24th)…9am-2pm

Christmas Day  (Dec. 25th)…Closed

Christmas Recovery Day (Dec. 26th)…10am-5pm

Today our site will be remodeled, we’re getting a whole new look.

The redesign has already taken a week of behind-the-scenes work and it’s now ready to install. However, in order to have our new style use the same URL (cwsandiego.com) as you’re used to, I have to take this site and our blog off-line and install our new site at this location, then make many adjustments to the new site.

This will likely take me most of the day.

So I beg your indulgence today. Don’t be discouraged if links are broken or the site looks terrible for a few hours. It’s only temporary. To the best of my abilities I’ll make the changeover as short and painless as possible. I encourage you to check back Thursday to see what we’ve done. As always, your comments and suggestions will be welcome.

Thank you for your patience. We are grateful for each and every person who visits our site. Our goal is to present you with an informative and easy-to-navigate site. We think our new design will accomplish that.

True, the economy is perhaps the greatest challenge facing our country. But there’s one aspect of our economy that is seldom addressed. Trash.

We are constantly encouraged to buy stuff. Buying stuff is supposed to make us happy, make us appear successful, justify our jobs. Ever hour on TV and in nearly every magazine we are deluged with advertising, exorting us to spend, spend, spend. Yet you can’t simply keep buying stuff without eventually having to throw some stuff away, even if it’s only the packaging your stuff came in.

I want to focus on electronic stuff. In many cases your new stuff is an upgrade to stuff you already have; a newer TV, a faster computer, a bigger monitor. You’ve finally given in to all the hype and bought yourself an iPhone. Now what do you do with your ancient cell phone (you know it’s ancient-all it can do is make phone calls)? No one on Craigslist wants it. You couldn’t get a single bid for it on eBay. Ah, what the heck, just toss it in the trash. The same scenario often plays out with monitors. You just got a sleek new 22″ widescreen LCD monitor, and now you have to find a new home for that 20th century monster CRT you’ve been using since AOL was a startup. All your friends are much cooler than you, they’ve been using LCDs for ages. None of them has any use for a 75 pound piece of dead technology. Once again Craigslist and eBay disappoint. Well, you know anything left out in the alley overnight disappears, so just park your old friend in the alley, or if your neighborhood is upscale, down the alley behind your neighbor’s house, and with any luck it will be gone before you leave for work the next morning.

OK, I’m using a touch of humor to make my point, but e-waste is deadly serious. Electronic trash is a world-wide concern. It is a problem that some nations attempt to solve by burdening other nations with their dangerous discards.

On the outskirts of Ghana’s biggest city sits a smoldering wasteland, a slum carved into the banks of the Korle Lagoon, one of the most polluted bodies of water on earth. The locals call it Sodom and Gomorrah.

Agbogbloshie has become one of the world’s digital dumping grounds, where the West’s electronic waste, or e-waste, piles up — hundreds of millions of tons of it each year.

When containers of old computers first began arriving in West Africa a few years ago, Ghanaians welcomed what they thought were donations to help bridge the digital divide. But soon exporters learned to exploit the loopholes by labeling junk computers “donations”…

“Some are from Germany and the U.K., and also from America,” he says, when asked where the equipment has come from. He sorts through them looking for working electronics that can be sold. He says that maybe 50 percent of the shipment is junk and the rest he will be able to salvage in some way.

E-waste generators are seldom malicious. We don’t carelessly abandon our discarded electronics with the intent to destroy another country or harm its kids. We just don’t think about it. We ignore the implications of our actions. We aren’t aware of what happens to our electronic trash nor do we want to know. We prefer ignorance. It’s such a massive problem and we feel so helpless to make any significant impact on it. Beside, our contribution to the problem is so small it hardly counts. I mean, it was only a hard drive we tossed in the trash.

As part of the investigation, one of the students buys a number of hard drives to see what is on them, secretly filming the transaction to avoid the seller’s suspicions.

The drives are purchased for the equivalent of US$35.

The students take the hard drives to Regent University in the Ghanaian capital and ask computer scientist Enoch Kwesi Messiah to help read what is on them.

Within minutes, he is scrolling through intimate details of people’s lives, files left behind by the hard drives’ original owners.

There is private financial data, too: credit card numbers, account information, records of online transactions the original owners may not have realized were even there.

“ I can get your bank numbers and I retrieve all your money from your accounts,” Messiah says. “If ever somebody gets your hard drive, he can get every information about you from the drive, no matter where it is hidden.”

That’s particularly a problem in a place like Ghana, which is listed by the U.S. State Department as one of the top sources of cyber crime in the world. And it’s not just individuals who are exposed. One of the drives the team has purchased contains a $22 million government contract.

It turns out the drive came from Northrop Grumman, one of America’s largest military contractors. And it contains details about sensitive, multi-million dollar U.S. government contracts. They also find contracts with the defense intelligence agency, NASA, even Homeland Security.

(Quotes courtesy of PBS’s Frontline)

If this issue does concern you or you’d like to know why it should, follow the above link to read the full story and view the episode of Frontline. Then do the planet a favor and learn more about responsible e-waste disposal in your area.

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