On... why are office staplers so rubbish?

This morning I needed to staple two sheets of paper together. Not an unreasonable thing to do in an office setting you would think? Well, stapler number one had two twisted staples sticking out of it in an uncanny impression of the teeth of Douglas Adams' hideous creation Agrajag, staples so jammed in that they could not be pulled out by hand. Stapler number two had the pushing mechanism misaligned with the staple holder and also did not work. Stapler number three, a little red number I had not seen before managed to actually draw blood while I was loading it. I therefore felt disinclined to actually try stapling anything with it. Stapler number four managed to drive a staple through the sheets of paper, hooray! However said staple was mangled with a sharp end sticking out and frankly looked a mess. Stapler number five finally did the job, but I know from experience that it too is temperamental, and has a good chance of jamming the next time I try it. So five staplers, several minutes of wasted time and paper (I had to print the document twice), blood and annoyance just to join two sheets of A4 together.

This seems to be the case with just about every stapler I have encountered in a office environment in the last few years. When I started my career, staplers were pleasingly solid things made of metal, not the poorly made apologies for staplers we have to put up with today with their veneer of shiny (or more often grubby) plastic over cheap, thin metal which fails to do what the machine is (or at least should be) designed to do: staple paper together in a reliable and predictable manner. Those old staplers might have cost a bit more but they worked. Reliably.

Perhaps I should calculate the interminable man hours lost in battling with cheap and nasty staplers, and present a cost benefit analysis of the importance of spending just a little bit more on a good quality stapler instead of the semi-useless items littering the stationary cupboards (and shortly thereafter, the bins) of offices across the land. Except that I have the nagging feeling that it is now only economically possible to produce cheap and nasty staplers. Perhaps all the manufactures of staplers that worked reliably for many years have gone out of business, victims of the quality and utility of their own products, and we are now left in a never ending cycle of substandard machines which need replacing ever more frequently?

In my previous career I had a 1970s stapler which despite its venerable age hardly ever jammed and served me well for many years. It was made by Rapid and manufactured in Sweden. Halcyon days, wish I had had it this morning....