Mon. Oct. 22, 2007
Today we announced a retail agreement with Staples, the world's largest office supply retail chain. Beginning on November 11, we will begin selling some Dell systems, displays, printers and ink and toner throughout 1,400 Staples stores across the United States.
Since we entered the printer market with Dell-branded printers in 2003, customers purchased replacement ink and toner via Dell.com. While that process has worked well for many of our customers, some like guardianxps shared an idea called "Sell ink cartridges at local retail" in the early days of IdeaStorm. We will still offer continue to offer ink and toner online—the only thing that this changes is that customers will have more options to get replacements when they need them.
As far as systems and other hardware, we will offer unique configurations of our Inspiron 1521 and 1721 notebooks, our Inspiron 530 desktop, the 19-inch SE198WFP or the 22-inch E228WFP widescreen LCD displays. As far as printers, we will offer Dell's 926 and 948 all-in-one inkjets and the 1320c color laser printer. Staples will offer ink and toner for most models of our printers. Customers can recycle by returning used Dell cartridges to the store for a $3.00 coupon that is good toward a future ink purchase.
With this agreement, Dell products are now available in over 10,000 stores worldwide. It's all part of our evolving retail strategy. If you're interested in seeing all retail-related blog content, please take a look at the Retail category. Otherwise, you can also get an RSS feed to the retail-specific blog content here.