2013-07-03

Good for the environment?

As several people have noticed, the Dell 3330DN printer offer from ebuyer is a tad special.
  • You buy a printer for £174.99
  • You get a free Ricoh printer as well
  • You claim the £75 cash back from Dell
  • You send the Ricoh to Dell as a trade-in and get a further £100 cash back
So, you end up with a Dell 3330DN printer with toner for -1p.

So the Ricoh printer, unopened, is recycled. It means these Ricoh printers are made and then destroyed without ever being used. Dell even pay the postage for the returned printer!

What's the betting this is Dell claiming on some government scheme for saving the planet by disposing of old printers. That must be good for the environment, no?

To top it off, as a company, if we buy this, we get to reclaim £29.17 VAT in the purchase, but the cash back has no VAT, so we make £29.18 on each printer we buy.

And, of course, what you then do is sell the printer on ebay for some small amount.

What a strange world we live in some times.


27 comments:

  1. It does make you wonder sometimes. I had to read this twice, then read Ebuyer and Dell's site twice to try and get my head around it. It seems very true. I'm tempted to give it a go!

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  2. Why not keep both printers and send some piece of crap to Dell that you either have lying around or off freecycle.

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  3. Why not keep both printers and send some piece of crap to Dell that you either have lying around or off freecycle.

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  4. Why not keep both printers and send some piece of crap to Dell that you either have lying around or off freecycle.

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  5. Why not keep both printers and send some piece of crap to Dell that you either have lying around or off freecycle.

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  6. you need to "account for the VAT" when you "dispose" of the printer for zero quid. Good luck arguing that with HMRC on either tax or VAT aspects, they love their 5-years+residual bull.

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    1. I'm not sure if you're right about that, I'd have to check with my accountant, but anyway the printer you're disposing of is the free gift (which you could argue you don't want and are thus recycling in an efficient way), not the one you've purchased (and thus the VAT you claimed back was from), so no problem...

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  7. I am going to give it a go, no doubt they are expecting to make a fortune out of you on toners...... I will be sending a piece of rubbish back to Dell!!

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  8. I will be giving it a go, seems like it should work!! I will certainly be sending them a rubbish printer back!!

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  9. This seems painfully close to money laundering to me. I wonder if they'll get away with it? Or if it's a genuine mistake?

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    Replies
    1. The Dell £175 cashback promotion has been going for well over a month now so that part isn't a mistake. eBuyer have been bundling that Ricoh for a couple weeks as well.

      Dell don't care that eBuyer are doing it. People suspect it is because they've got some kind of recycling target they need to hit and flogging the 3330DN is to clear stocks since it is a discontinued printer.

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  10. Strange conflict of thoughts going through my head at the moment. There's a part of me that wants to take advantage - after all, something for nothing is always a good thing, isn't it? Then there's the part of me that knows we don't need a new printer (especially a mono one) and that getting something just because I can is a bad thing - bad for the soul (in that encouraging materialism cannot be good) and bad for the environment too.

    So, I'm going to be good and not be greedy. I'll still feel like I missed out though.

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    Replies
    1. I was the same too... until I saw the price for replacement toner! I then stopped myself from ordering this.

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    2. Well, you just get a new printer for free when you run out of toner!

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  11. Can you combine it with an offer from http://www.topcashback.co.uk/ebuyer/ and get cash back too?

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  12. This is the sort of thing that would be posted on moneysavingexpert.com and then removed within 5 minutes, lol.

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  13. This is the sort of thing which would end up on moneysavingexpert.com, only to be removed 5 minutes later, due to thousands of orders! lol

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  14. I actually could use a printer, I've not had a working one for about two years at home.
    However I guess if I managed that long without printing anything I probably don't need one.

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  15. In the immortal style Slashdot:

    1. Buy Dell printer
    2. Profit.

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  16. The free Ricoh printer seems to have been removed from the ebuyer page.

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    Replies
    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    2. They ran out of stock on the Ricoh printers. Its actually an item they normally sell. http://www.ebuyer.com/386209-ricoh-aficio-sp100su-multifunction-mono-laser-printer-ricohsp100su

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  17. If you have a careful read of the T&Cs (https://tradetosave.trade-in-platform.com/_Content/en-US/TermsAndConditions.html) there are a couple of things to mention. One is that they claim (in condition 17) everything sent in gets assessed for reusability, so one would hope that a brand new in-the-box printer would end up getting used as-is rather than scrapped!

    The other is pretty sneaky... there is (in condition 16) a 6Kg weight limit on trade-in printers (including power cables/adaptors)! I just checked the two printers we have sitting in the loft waiting for me to figure out how best to get rid of them. One is an HP LJ4 at 18.3Kg (ouch). The other is a little HP multifunction thingy; feels fairly light but actually comes to 5.6Kg. Add its PSU and a mains cable and it's 6.1Kg. So... looks like I may not be taking advantage of this particular offer after all!

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    Replies
    1. The weight limit is for the free return shipping. If you go over then you have to pay to send it yourself. Not sure why it says 6kg though in the T&Cs. People have asked Dell and they're fine with everything up to 20kg for the prepaid return shipping. I know for certain that the post office will take something up to 10kg as I sent my trade in printer today which weighed that exactly.

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  18. My order is now showing as dispatched for delivery tomorrow. We'll see how it goes :p

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  19. So one of my orders reappeared, for delivery tomorrow.

    Be interesting to see if the others also reappear...

    Even if the extra cashback didn't appear, £140 odd quid ex VAT for a couple of laser printers isn't bad.

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