If you want to understand the copier industry, do not start with a market report. Start in a dealer warehouse before sunrise.
The lights hum on one aisle at a time. Service techs drift through the side door grabbing trunk stock for the day. Someone is already arguing across the counter about whether a call should be marked open or closed on the dispatch board. A service manager studies the ticket queue with a cup of coffee that went cold twenty minutes ago.
Step into a dealership warehouse at 7:30 in the morning and the story of this industry is sitting right in front of you.
This business has always been practical. Less theory, more toner.
Which is why the recent headlines about Hewlett-Packard and Xerox are worth paying attention to. Not because the copier industry is collapsing. It is not. But because they reveal something important.
The industry is moving into its next chapter.
London, Kentucky.
Not a robotics lab.
Not a venture fund zip code.
A copier dealership.
Precision Duplicating Solutions started in a garage in 2002. Off-lease machines. Service calls that ran long. Contracts signed at folding tables. They built trust the old way. Thirty-three counties. Trucks on the road before sunrise. Technicians who know which side door the customer prefers.
When print slowed, they did not panic. They looked at what they already understood.
Install.
Support.
Service.
Contract.
That discipline led to water.
On Friday’s with Frank, Art Post keeps it simple.
No drama. Just numbers and patterns. IT services and production print now make up 34 percent of dealer revenue. A3 still carries margin, but the foundation feels thinner. Millennials shifted away from print quietly. Gen Z never built the habit.
No one declares print dead. No one predicts a rebound.
The message is steadier than that. The channel is not collapsing. It is changing shape. And once you see the shift, it is difficult to pretend it is temporary.
For the last two years, Ai has promised something just out of reach.
Smarter tools. Faster work. Real leverage.
And yet, for a lot of people, the feeling is still the same. You use Ai every day. You get some wins. You save some time. But the breakthrough never quite arrives. You keep scrolling releases. You keep tweaking prompts. You keep waiting for the moment it all clicks.
That tension is the point of this piece.
Weather, Robots, Copiers, and Why Purpose Keeps Coming Up
Late January gave us a familiar setup. Half the country freezing, the other half sweating, iguanas falling out of trees in Florida, and someone somewhere slipping on ice in Dallas. That was the warm-up.
From there, the conversation did what Ask Us Anything does best. It wandered. But not randomly. It kept circling the same gravity well: Ai is no longer theoretical, and the ripple effects are already hitting industries people still think are “stable.”
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| “The Moment It Clicks” |
That shift is why I keep circling back to service.
The device can be leased, bundled, swapped, refreshed, managed, or quietly replaced by a fleet of smaller printers and a pile of scanned PDFs. The customer’s expectation stays stubbornly old-fashioned: when they hit Print, something comes out.
In a recent piece for The Imaging Channel, I wrote it plainly: most dealers think they sell machines. They do not. They sell time. When a device has problems, time gets chewed up, and service becomes the business end of the relationship. (The Imaging Channel)
Why authority is dissolving as Ai removes friction from knowledge, judgment, and power
It sat inside law firms, newsrooms, universities, executive suites. It wore credentials and spoke in guarded language. If you wanted access, you waited. If you wanted authority, you earned it slowly, through institutions designed to ration knowledge and decision-making.
That era is ending. Not with a crash, but with a quiet loss of leverage.
The piece introduces CRICKETSUS, a new startup founded by industry veterans Greg Walters and Art Post, and details their plan to leverage the existing B2B office technology channel to accelerate the adoption of humanoid robots nationwide.
Through insights from the founders and a forward-looking analysis of MPS, MSPs, and robotics OEMs, the article outlines how a new American robotics industry could emerge from proven business models.
Xerox’s Dundalk closure is not a local story. It is a measurable signal for a channel built on pages.
That facility is closing at the end of the year. Xerox has sold the site. The last remaining workers have received redundancy packages. A Xerox spokesperson confirmed the plant “will close at years end,” and explained the decision as part of an effort to simplify the business and align with what clients need today. Some of the toner manufacturing will move to Xerox’s Webster, New York facility.
It reads like a small corporate note, the kind that lands in a regional paper and disappears under holiday headlines. For anyone who owns or runs a copier dealership, it lands differently. This is the supply chain talking out loud.
I have watched the copier channel carry companies through more uncertainty than most people remember. Every transition from analog to digital, every shift in workflow, every surprise request landing late in the day. Dealers always found a way to keep customers steady. They made complicated equipment feel manageable because they showed up, listened, and solved what was in front of them.
That same experience is shaping the next chapter. Robotics is gaining attention, but what matters is how businesses absorb new tools without losing momentum. Dealers understand that part better than anyone. They earned trust door by door, meeting by meeting, and now those relationships are becoming the bridge to a technology most companies are still learning to understand.
I just wrapped a full read of Celeste Dame’s latest deep-dive: Beyond the Page: Reinventing the Copier Channel in a Less-Print World. And let me tell you, this isn’t your average vendor-padded puff piece or PR-massaged forecast. This thing is loaded with actual numbers, actual insights, and one brutal truth: the clicks are drying up—and they’re not coming back.
We’re talking a nearly 50% drop in U.S. paper usage since 2011. Copier/MFP unit sales? Down 20%. Post-COVID? Even worse. Hybrid work hit print volumes like a freight train, and they’re not bouncing back. Service contracts are thinning out, meter reads are tanking, and even the diehard lease-renewal crowd is pushing back.
But here’s the kicker. This report isn’t mourning the death of the copier. It’s lighting a torch under what comes next. And surprisingly? That next thing has legs. Wheels. LiDAR.
A name tag.
I have watched the copier channel carry companies through more uncertainty than most people remember. Every transition from analog to digital, every shift in workflow, every surprise request landing late in the day. Dealers always found a way to keep customers steady. They made complicated equipment feel manageable because they showed up, listened, and solved what was in front of them.
That same experience is shaping the next chapter. Robotics is gaining attention, but what matters is how businesses absorb new tools without losing momentum. Dealers understand that part better than anyone. They earned trust door by door, meeting by meeting, and now those relationships are becoming the bridge to a technology most companies are still learning to understand.
