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 realized.
For 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! I must whisper this part — at the office.