Paul's Comments

I have a copy on my desk of the complete Office Max catalog. Now consider that Office Max probably is at best, the #3 retailer for office supplies, with probably Staples as #1 and Office Depot as #2. But still, for comprehensiveness one can't claim Office Max isn't trying. It's phone-book sized (1152 pages plus front and back cover, and a page of pull-off tabs to stick on various areas in order to make things easy to find) probably cover almost every possible thing you'd buy for an office (now what's a good comic exception? Hookers and flash paper, which bookies used to use to write their notes on so they could burn them in the event the cops show up to raid them. Oh wait, they do have a very nice picture of an attractive lady, so maybe the only thing they don't sell is flash paper. By the way, in case you're humor challenged, this was a joke; please don't sue me.)

One thing that now hurts is, I threw away my old laser printer, only to discover Staples or one of these places was offering $50 in store credit to recycle an old laser printer. Oh well, it would be kind of hard to carry a used laser back to a store. What am I saying, I carried the new laser I bought home on the bus. Yeah, but it was in a box at the time, that had handles.

Anyway, back to the Office Max catalog. They have over 30 pages of classes and types of paper alone, along with some interesting statistics: one 500 page ream of 30% recycled paper saves:

• 8 gallons of waste water
• 5.3 pounds of greenhouse gases
• 1.4 pounds of solid waste, and
• 12,500 BTUs of energy (for those who don't know the meaning, 1 BTU is the equivalent of the energy generated by one match)

Now what else does Office Max sell? I've moved the article about a Lexmark printer to a separate entry. So let's see what else. Coffee, cookies, furniture, cleaning supplies, pens and pencils (79 pages!), even 19 pages of staplers. 33 kinds of ring binders, and more than 240 different Office Max-label products. Plus 5 pages of coat hooks, racks and hangers.

Oh, so much amazing crap valuable merchandise.