November $50 Gas Card Winner...

Kimara Thompson was the winner of this month's gas card drawing--congratulations!! And now with falling gas prices (now less than $2 a gallon at some valley locations!) this $50 card could possibly last for two fill-ups! I know the price of refilling my Chevy HHR has gone from almost $60 dollars per fill-up to just over $30 now!! My only fear is now that gas is "cheap" we will all return to our old gas-guzzling habits and prices will skyrocket once again. Hopefully, we have all learned a few lessons from the recent gouging and maybe we will continue to carpool more often or ride our bikes when possible. I'm sure the current economy will discourage people from running out and buying new Hummers--so hopefully driving smaller more efficient cars will be a new trend for the near future. If we all do our part in conserving where we can it will make a huge difference! I also think if everyone were to drive those couple extra miles to the cheapest gas station in town it would force the local gas station prices to be more competitive. Anyways... congratulations Kimara!!

Printer Recommendations...

Today it was my saturday to work in the store. And as I was driving home I was noticing the bright red and yellow colors in the Wellsville Mountains - and I realized fall is upon us. It truly felt like autumn today as it was cloudy all day and we even had a few minutes of rain and it was definately cooler. Cache Valley is a beautiful place to live year-round, but the autumn and spring seasons are my favorite. This is a wonderful place to live.

Anyways, I apologize that I have not posted anything recently. In our last email newsletter we sent out a couple of recommendations for home business/small business laser printers. As always, HP is our first recommendation. For many reasons: their print quality is unmatched, their consumables are reasonably priced, and they are good cartridges for refilling and remanufacturing. So in an effort to better serve our customers needs we have begun to sell some used laser printers - and we have had a great response in the last week. The biggest selling point is the savings in cost per page versus inkjet printers. Depending on the cartridges you can cut your cost per page from $0.05 per page or higher to $0.01 to $0.02 per page by switching to a laser printer and using remanufactured cartridges. If you are doing a lot of text or just black printing - this can be a very significant amount of savings! And you don't need to get rid of your inkjet printer, but you can hold onto it and only use it when you do need color prints or other functions. Our printers range from $70 to $99 dolors and include your first remanufactured cartridge (a $40 to $60 value). They also include a full 30 day warranty in case something should go wrong. But even if you do not buy from us, let us know what your needs are, what you are currently using and we can calculate your cost per page and your potential savings by upgrading to a laser printer.

We'd like to thank all our loyal customers for your continued business. We truly appreciate the opportunity to serve your needs. Please let us know if there is anyway we can improve your experience with us. We hope you all have a tremendous weekend!!

Mountainside Elementary Fundraiser Program...

I'm sure all of you mom's out there are grateful to send your kids back to school this week! We are grateful to Mountainside Elementary, the new elementary in Mendon, to participate in their fundraising this year. There will be cartridge collection bins located in each classroom, as each of the classes will be competing against each other to raise the most money each month. The winning class will get to wear their pajamas to school and get an ice cream buffet or a breakfast reward provided by different sponsors. They are raising money with cartridges, box tops, milk caps etc. Cartridge World offers a couple of different ways of participating in this program. The kids or parents can bring their empty cartridges and place them in the school bins. Or customers can bring in their cartridges to be refilled at our retail location, mention the fundraiser, and we will apply $1 to the classroom of your choice. Once again, thank you Mountainside Elementary for allowing us to partner with you in raising additional money for the school. We enjoy serving the businesses, schools, and residents of this great community. We understand that printer cartridges are not your number one concern, however, we love saving you money that you can spend on gas, or utilities, or cell phones, or whatever you need a little extra money for.

Congratulations to Kim Chadwick!

Congratulations to Kim Chadwick for winning our July drawing for a $50 gas gift card! You can also enter to win at our Logan location. We will draw a winner each month. Good luck!

Epsons Continued...

Just a little follow-up from last weeks blog. We are having success refilling the Epson T068, T069, and T078 series cartridges when they are brought in before the exclamation point shows up on the ink level screen. If the ink level gets to the point of showing an 'X' - we have had zero successful refills. So exclamation points are iffy, but anytime before that pops up they have worked well. If you have a food scale at home you can also weigh the cartridge. If it weighs less than 22.5 grams it usually is unrefillable. If it weighs above that - you are good to go. We can also weigh those for you in the store and we do have OEM's available if they will not work. Special thanks to Jon Sybenga the past couple of weeks in helping us get these cartridges figured out. Jon is a summer Valley resident and is heading back to Sun City this weekend - we'll see you next year, Jon!

Newer Epson Cartridges...

We are seeing more and more of the Epson T069 and Epson T078 series cartridges in our store. And as many of you are finding out, Epson has made a poor decision with this new cartridge design. They are following in the footsteps of Lexmark and Dell in trying to discourage the refilling and reuse of their cartridges. However, what Epson is failing to understand is that many of their loyal customers DO want to use aftermarket cartridges in their printers. HP seems to be the only major OEM (original equipment manufacturer) that understands that there is a large percentage of businesses and consumers who want the benefits of aftermarket cartridges and that this industry is not going to just disappear.

Anyways... I just wanted to help our customers understand what Epson is doing and how we can beat them at their own game. These new cartridges have an external chip (as Epson has done for a long time now), however, now they have added an internal chip that senses when the ink is gone. Once that internal chip registers 'no ink' it destroys the external chips ability to be reset, thus making the cartridge of no value whatsoever. So the key to refilling these cartridges is to remove them when they are about 75% to 80% empty and bring them in to be refilled. Since you will not be using 100% of the ink available - we have adjusted our pricing to reflect that. We are priced at $7.99 for the black cartridge and $5.99 for the color cartridges. This is compared to Epson's pricing of $18.99 for the black and $13.99 for the colors. We understand that it is a hassle. But these cartridges can be effectively refilled using this method and they can put some cash back in your pocket. This is also the reason why we discourage our customers from purchasing Epson, Lexmark, or Dell brand printers. Please let us know if you have any further questions. We also have a flyer available in our store that covers these cartridges. Here is a list of printers that use these cartridges:

Stylus CX5000, CX6000, CX 7000F, CX7400, CX8400, CX9400, CX9475F, Stylus Photo RX580, RX595, RX680, R260, R280, R380, and RX580.

Getting Started...

Hello and thank you for visiting our blog! We just wanted to create a forum where people could ask us questions, post comments, or discuss anything on our mind or yours. I kind of envisioned this blog to cover anything related to our retail store, Cartridge World Logan. However, we may cover topics ranging from photo printing to recycling to wherever else this takes us! So please feel free to post anything on your mind. Hopefully, most of your comments are positive ;) But we also want to hear from you if there are concerns or problems. We are fairly laid back people so we hope you will relax and enjoy as well. To start out, I will try to post a new blog every week. Then once we get going we can adjust that depending on the amount of participation and the demand. Again, thank you for visiting and enjoy!