EDIT: This happened back in 2025. Will leave as I’m sure I’m not the only one that didn’t know, but I saw it on hacker news and didn’t realize it was a year old. My bad.
In an odd approach to trying to improve customer tech support, HP allegedly implemented mandatory, 15-minute wait times for people calling the vendor for help with their computers and printers in certain geographies.
Callers from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Ireland, and Italy were met with the forced holding periods, The Register reported on Thursday. The publication cited internal communications it saw from February 18 that reportedly said the wait times aimed to “influence customers to increase their adoption of digital self-solve, as a faster way to address their support question. This involves inserting a message of high call volumes, to expect a delay in connecting to an agent and offering digital self-solve solutions as an alternative.”
I self-solved my HP problems by never buying from HP again. I love my Brother printer. Don’t any of you dare quote stories about Brother enshittifying stuff in the replies (I will cry).
Brother has started selling printers that require an ink or toner subscription. I had to watch out for that last time I bought one.
Even if they get worse, I’m sure another brand will take their place.
For me the solution is simply to just not own a printer. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve had to print something in the last year. Anyway that’s what parents are for, their house is where you store things you only occasionally want.
But doctor… I am the parent.
Seriously, half the stuff that we print is coloring pages.
Even if they did it’s nowhere near the level of HP
Yet.