Seth Kinast’s Blog

I got my mom and dad a Brother QL-500 label printer for their eBay stuff last week. This is a sweet little printer… it's a thermal-transfer unit, which means there is no ink. It just heats special labels and turns them black in the selected areas, making text.

Previously Mom and Dad had been:

1. Paying to ship package via USPS via PayPal
2. Downloading label as image
3. Printing label on an 8 1/2" x 11" piece of paper
4. Cutting it out
5. Taping it to the box using box tape around the edges only, since you can't tape over the barcode

This label printer is supported by PayPal directly, so now their workflow looks like this:

1. Print label (at a speed of 50 labels a minute, instead of 6 pages per minute like the printer)
2. Stick it on

Yes it's good

When I purchased the printer, I was given the option to buy extra rolls of labels with it. It uses a pretty cool "roll-cartridge" that you can just snap in, so there's no messy feeding of labels or chance for tearing, crumpling, etc. I decided that the single roll of 300 labels it came with would be enough for them to decide if they liked it or not, and declined the extras. Rolls only cost about $15, so it's still less than it would be to print on paper.

We received the printer today, and I opened the package and started setting it up. When it came time to pop in the roll cartridge, I grabbed it… and found address labels, not shipping labels, ack! They were only half the size of shipping labels, and wouldn't work for what we needed them to do. So off I went to OfficeMax (the closest office supply store) to pick up a pack

I got to OfficeMax and found the labels. Whoa, $27 for one pack! I have been boycotting OfficeMax for over a year now, and this only reinforces that belief. Dad said that we really needed the labels now, instead of waiting a week to have them shipped, and that $10 wasn't that bad of a difference. It hurt really badly to pay over half of what the printer cost just for some more labels… so I called my grandma and had her get me the phone number of the Office Depot two miles away. I called over there and asked what price their labels were. The guy put me on hold for a really long time, and Dad was starting to get impatient and inch towards the checkout line. Finally, the guy came back on the line.

Well, my computer says I have three, but I can't find them yet because they're not in the aisle. They're somewhere in the clearance section, which means they are only $14 a roll.

Sweet! That was less than they would cost shipped online! I gave him my number and he said that he would call me when he found them. We had almost arrived at Office Depot and he called back.

Well sir, it took me awhile to find them because they actually weren't in the clearance rack… they were actually in the special 50%-off clearance pile and so they are only $7 apiece.

Oh, and I have four, not three.

Yayyy! I told him I'd take all four and blurbled the rest of the way to the store. It was good that I didn't buy the labels online after all!