Memes

As someone who has seen printers do these kinds of numbers for a while, it's going to be rough. There's three basic options, first of all you can go with the hyper expensive enterprise level printers. They are space age futuristic, you can't touch them, there is a phone number that warps an engineer to your location to fix it if it breaks. But it doesn't break, it just works and keeps on working. Engineers still show up every two weeks and do magic shit to it. There's always an even number of units installed so there will always be a backup machine right around the corner. Big downside, it costs mucho monies, like shockingly much.

Then there's the professional line of printers. Pretty decent, you can do a lot of fixes yourself. It will break down every now and again and need to be replaced once a year. But it's much better in terms of costs. Still hurts to put a machine down in the back of the shops with a "parts" label on it, but it's a solid option.

My favorite option by far is the jank option. Buying the absolute cheapest printer you can get. We are talking about laser printers (don't even think of doing volume on anything other than laser), so cheap means bad. Brother is by far the best choice, they cut cost where possible, but don't go to far. These things are then rode hard and put away wet. They start making weird noises, they start emitting dust, their print quality suffers, but they keep on trucking. You can tell the people using it some neat tricks, like hit it pretty hard here when it makes this kind of noise. If it gives out this error, reset the thing using this secret special code so it ignores all the errors and keeps going. The little rubber paper pickup ring goes first, so order a box of thousands of those from China for a few bucks and you get pretty fast at replacing those. And the best part, just buy like a shit ton of the printers. You can get like 10 for the price of one decent printer. Just have cold stand-by units at every station and switching over is 10 secs of work if the infra is configured correctly.

Pretty wasteful, so maybe not something one would do these days. But back in the day, I've seen entire logistics hubs running on those cheap little lasers. Churning out hundreds of labels and packing slips per hour each, without hardly any costs or maintenance hours. And basically zero downtime.