'Quit sending millennials things to print at home': Why does no one own a printer any more?

Just occasionally, a slightly mundane post on Twitter will end up striking an unexpected chord. Last week, Scott Irlbacher, a resident of Pittsburgh, in the US, aired his thoughts about computer printers. Within a few hours, it had racked up a quarter of a million likes.

“Quit sending millennials things to print at home,” he wrote. “We don't have a printer. [We’ve] been surviving on secretly using our work printers for years.”

Thousands of replies demonstrated how printers are no longer seen as a necessary evil; many are baffled by their existence, while others are celebrating their passing. “Anything I have to print can be emailed to my local copy shop,” read one reply. “They have it ready when I walk in the door. Cheaper than a home printer.”

Quit sending Xenninials and Millennials things to print at home. We don't have a printer. And if we do, we haven't found the power cord from our last move. We had been surviving on secretly using our work printers for years.

There was also more evidence of a generational divide: "I told my boss once that the 30 and under crowd just doesn't have printers at home, and they didn't believe me!"

The swing towards digital, driven in part by the habits of the younger generation, is accelerating this year because of the effects of Covid-19. Market research firm IDC has predicted that the number of pages printed worldwide will fall by more than 13 per cent in 2020, saving the equivalent of seven football fields worth of paper every minute of every day.

But in truth, global printer sales have been in decline for some time. “It's a real challenge for the industry, because even the older generation is printing less,” says Louella Fernandes at printer industry analysts Quocirca. “And now