Have you recently bought a new multifunctional copier with a finisher/stapler?
If so, can you remember if the staples were included in the cost per page or not included in the cost per page? Very rarely have I ever seen staples included, and I never thought much about the cost of staples and to tell you the truth neither did any of my customers. I tell them staples are NOT included and they say OK! No big deal right?
Heck, what does a box of staples cost? I know it’s cheap and you know it’s cheap, but how cheap are staples when you buy them at Staples? A generic box of 25,000 staples will set you back a whopping $4.99. Let’s dig a little deeper; what is the actual cost per staple? Based on the yield and the cost, the price of each staple would be .0001996. Let me see that’s…….ah…ah well it’s not that much. When we think staples, we’re thinking “I could toss them in the garbage and it’s no big loss.”
Tonight was a lot like any other night and I needed to get some new information on the print4pay hotel forums for the members. I make sure there is new information posted daily that is related to the industry. So, I decided to investigate the real cost of staples for copy machines. I was amazed at the cost per staple when I did the math. Let’s take one of the Big 4 copier manufacturers (Xerox, Ricoh, Konica Minolta, Canon), and look at the cost of the more popular staple cartridges. In this case this one particular staple cartridge will fit most of the models from 40 pages per minute to 90 pages per minute. The cost for 5 cartridges, which have a yield of 25,000 staples is $210. So with 25,000 staples the cost per staple is a whopping .008426 per staple. That’s almost 500 percent higher than the cost of the staple that you buy at the Office Super Store. That’s a pretty steep increase for a staple, but I’ll say that most of the manufacturers present a fancy delivery system for the staple. When using staples to make booklets, the cost can be as high as almost two cents to staple the booklet.
I understand we’re talking about pennies and fractions of pennies, but what about the high-volume users who are stapling 10,000 booklets? Did anyone tell them that cost of the staples alone would cost almost $173 per month? How about the church or school that staples 5,000 tests or bulletins or reports? Was there a mention the staples would cost an additional $42 per month? Heck, that’s almost $500 a year in staples. In addition, the finisher/staplers don’t come cheap. You can expect to pay anywhere from $1,000 to $6,000 per unit. True story, I was in a municipality looking at some old equipment, in particular one copier had a finisher/stapler unit. The cost of the finisher/stapler unit when they made the purchase was about $2,300. Over the course of five years they only used the stapler 476 times (true most systems will give you a report of how often the stapler was used). In this case it cost the municipality $4.83 cents to produce 476 stapled reports, and let’s not forget the cost of the staple at .008. I recommended getting a new system without the stapler and keeping a stapler near the system. Something as mundane as staples, who would have thought that the cost was so high? I guess it’s the price we pay for ease of use and technology. Geesh, I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel when I have to write about staples!
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