Decades of innovation that have been invested, not to make a better product, but mostly on how to extract more and more money from their victims, I mean "customers".
I would like to own a printer again, but for printing something like once a month, I just can't financially justify spending several hundred bucks on a device that might, at the whim of the manufacturer, decide that the way I'm using it is not okay anymore, is probably designed to break after two years, requires me to sign up for a subscription service for ink, or whatever BS else the decision makers in this space come up with.
Setting aside the general decline of the printer industry, and simplifying slightly, those two interests compliment each other into:
1. Producing the cheapest possible product, and then selling it for a loss while concocting subscription schemes to make-up for the lost profits at the point of sale of the product.
2. Paying employees in general less and less money proportional to inflation to "reduce costs", thus forcing the average person to demand cheaper and cheaper products. Completing the cycle.