Opinion: If 2020 weren’t strange enough, printers are staging a comeback


The printer, the underappreciated office wallflower, has inked its place in the work-from-home future, for now. — Pixabay

The Covid-19 pandemic is creating a deeper appreciation for things such as one’s health, getting together with friends, the great outdoors – and printers. Yes, home printers, those clunky deskside contraptions of a bygone era, are suddenly making a comeback, and it may outlast this crisis.

As a recent Deloitte report put it, when the virus hit, hundreds of millions of people “brought their laptops home in a bag ... but left their printers behind!” And oh, how we’ve missed them – not for the whir of the machine grabbing a sheet, nor the whoosh of the paper hitting its landing (though plenty of ASMR printer recordings do exist). Rather, it’s because we still print a lot more than we probably realised. One example: During regional Covid-19 lockdowns, consumers turned to online shopping, and that brought with it the inconvenience of needing to make returns and print shipping labels. That’s something office workers may have tended to do – shh! for I must whisper this part – at the office.

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Work from home , printers

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