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It's not really a new trend anymore: manufacturers advertise that their products have low energy consumption. In our case, printers do not use much power, checkouts too, and most of all, every device uses less electricity than those of the competitors. Is this about being environmentally friendly? Not really. In the ADC/POS industry, all devices consume less electricity than they did five years ago, and since that time, the implementation of mobile devices has multiplied. The environmental effect of the battery packs and batteries that cannot be recycled is hardly foreseeable. At the checkout, most printers still use thermal paper, a flattened chemical bomb.

Logically, the topic of "Go Green" in our industry is not about protecting nature or its resources, but rather, saving money. This would be really good if the basic approach would be to sell energy-saving devices. The manufacturers champion the cause: hardly a printer/scanner/touch screen out there that according to advertising does not save a whole lot of euros in energy consumption, which leaves you with so many that you can hardly stack. "Are you saving more than you are spending?" would be a more appropriate slogan here.

But the reality is: our retailers check the shelves for the device with the combination that has the best price, the best performance and a resilient quality. No one, and really no one asks us about follow-up costs during sales talks. And if our retailers do not do that, then this topic is obviously not important to end customers. Pity.