A slightly crippled printer

When you find a product you really like, it can be a real downer to discover that a feature you had every reason to believe was there has deliberately been withheld. Such is the experience of one reader with the Dymo LabelWriter 400 printer and its stamp-printing capability.

“The Dymo LabelWriter is a nifty USB label printer that has ended my suffering at the hands of a Canon multifunction printer that never could quite print envelopes,” the reader wrote. “Included in the box is a roll of postal-imprint pink-striped labels that lets you print stamps — you buy the labels and postage — from an outfit called Endicia.com . And it works pretty well for printing 42-cent first class stamps, 59-cent 2-oz stamps, and $4.80 priority mail stamps. Then I tried to print $5.32 to send a one-ounce letter first class, Certified Mail, Return Receipt Requested. But there was no way to enter a numeric value for the stamps, nor was there a menu option for Certified Mail let alone RRR. A visit to the help screen produced the following:”

Why can’t I enter my own postage value?

DYMO Stamps is USPS approved to print postage for First-Class, Priority Mail, Express Mail, and International mailpieces only at the postage weights listed. Shipping other sizes and methods involves a number of factors, such as weight, destination, insurance, delivery confirmation, and other services. Go to endicia.com for information about upgrading to the full mailing solution that also uses your LabelWriter printer.

While this suggests that it’s the government’s fault customers can’t print whatever value they need, that’s not actually the case. “In reality, the USPS allows Endicia.com to print custom postage values, it’s just that the Dymo Stamps crippleware version doesn’t. All you have to do to actually enter the value of the desired postage stamp is to sign up for one of Endicia’s subscription plans which run from $9.95 to $34.95 per month, postage and labels not included.”

This limitation wouldn’t have bugged the reader all that much if Dymo had simply made it clear from the beginning. Quite the contrary, though, the Dymo website says one can use the LabelWriter 400 “to print precise postage with no monthly fee,” which simply isn’t true. And the reader’s complaints drew a rather smarmy response from Endicia that “we are looking at adding the supported postage rates for the program on our sign up pages to prevent this confusion and are speaking with Dymo as well to make this more clear.”

The whole thing left the reader with an unpleasant feeling about a product that he had otherwise been quite happy with. “What I wound up having to do is to print a $4.80 stamp and a $0.59 stamp to mail my certified, wasting seven cents. In other words, it’s just as I would have done with my drawerful of odd-valued stamps, except the whole point of printing your own postage stamps is to not have to try and figure out which combination of stamps adds up to $5.32. Of course, I could also sign up for the least expensive annual subscript ion to Endicia. At $59.40, I figure it will pay for itself once I print the accurate postage for 856 certified letters within a year.”

What product have you been disappointed to find is just a little bit crippled? Post your comments about it below or write me at Foster@gripe2ed.com.