Did Office Depot Go Out of Business? No — But Is Business Select Worth It?

I've been handling office supply and print orders for my company for seven years. In that time, I've personally made—and documented—five significant purchasing mistakes, totaling roughly $3,200 in wasted budget. Now I maintain our team's procurement checklist to prevent others from repeating my errors.

So when people ask me "did Office Depot go out of business?" I get where they're coming from. Stores have closed. The brand has changed. But no—they're not gone. What changed is how they sell. The question that actually matters for your wallet is whether Office Depot Business Select beats buying ad-hoc, wherever the price is lowest today.

I've done both, extensively. Here's the comparison across three dimensions: pricing transparency, print services, and support.

Dimension 1: Pricing Transparency — Structured Pricing vs. Retail Roulette

My most expensive mistake in seven years came from a vendor that undercut every big-box store on printer paper. The quote was 15% lower than anything I'd seen. Except—oh, right—it didn't include the shipping fee, the fuel surcharge, the "small order processing fee," or the minimum quantity that forced me to store boxes in a hallway for four months.

Since then I've asked a different question. Not "what's the price?" but "what's not included?"

Think about how you'd calculate overtime for an employee. You'd pull up an overtime calculator and get the actual cost of those extra hours. Not a vibe, a number. But when most of us buy office supplies, we look at a headline figure and nod.

Same habit applies to selling. Before selling gold, you'd check a scrap gold calculator for the melt value. You'd never let the buyer set the number without verifying. Yet those same business owners will accept the first office supply quote they see.

Business Select pricing works differently. Member pricing is visible before you commit. Discounts apply consistently across the catalog—or at least, they don't disappear at checkout like one-time online coupons tend to do. Ad-hoc buying gives you flashy savings that quietly shrink when shipping and rush charges attach themselves.

I'll just say it: I trust the vendor who lists all fees up front, even if the total looks a bit higher at first. Because that number is the real number. The vendor who hides fees until checkout is the vendor who'll do it again next month.

So for pricing transparency, Business Select wins. Not because it's always cheapest. Because the price you see is the price you can plan around.

Dimension 2: Print Services vs. Owning Your Own Printer

This is where I completely lost my head. I bought a $600 office printer thinking it was a smart investment. It was the opposite.

Quick primer on how does a printer work—specifically a laser printer, since that's the office workhorse: it charges a photosensitive drum, applies toner, and fuses the toner onto paper with heat. Every one of those steps involves moving parts and consumables that degrade. Color printing means tracking four toner cartridges that will always empty at different times.

I knew this in theory. But did I factor it into cost-per-page calculations? No. I took the $600 price, divided it by our monthly print volume, and convinced myself it'd pay off in fourteen months.

My gut said I was missing something. The numbers on my spreadsheet said otherwise.

My gut was right.

The toner, the maintenance kit, the test pages, and the color jobs that were "close enough" added up to roughly $1,100 in the first year. On top of the $600 machine. For someone who obsesses over unit costs, I'd done zero math on the thing that costs the most.

So let's compare with a print service like Office Depot's Print & Copy Center. Yes, they charge per job. But the price is explicit—you get a quote before they print. And professional operations hold to standards that an office printer rarely meets.

Commercial print quality is expected to hit 300 DPI at final size. A mid-range office printer can claim that on paper, but maintaining consistent, color-accurate output page after page is different. If your logo uses a specific Pantone color, the matching ability alone justifies professional help. My in-house printer produced shades that were "sort of right." Sort of right is wrong.

Paper adds another layer. Standard copy paper is 20 lb bond, about 75 GSM. Client-facing materials call for 24 lb at least. Business cards need cover stock around 216 GSM. Running heavier stocks through an office printer means tray adjustments, feed jams, and wasted sheets.

Here's the conclusion I didn't expect to reach: for anything client-facing—business cards, brochures, signs, presentations—print services usually cost less overall than operating your own mid-range printer, once you add toner, waste, downtime, and your own labor. The in-house printer still has a job: internal memos, one-off pages, last-minute paperwork. But if you're printing to impress, outsource it.

Dimension 3: Business Select Perks — and Why the "Going Out of Business" Rumor Won't Die

So why does everyone keep asking if Office Depot is closing forever?

Honestly, I'm not 100% sure. My best guess: the store closures people have seen over the past decade feel like signs of a dying company, when they're actually signs of a company pivoting toward B2B services. The retail footprint is smaller, so the average consumer sees less of the brand. Rumor does the rest.

I'm not a financial analyst, so I can't speak to the balance sheet. What I can tell you as a buyer is that the business services side has clearly become the focus. That's where Business Select fits in.

What do you actually get? Member pricing, rewards that accumulate across purchases, and access to a team that answers questions instead of an automated chat that repeats them. The last one matters more than you'd think.

Here's a practical example. USPS defines a letter as a piece up to 6.125 × 11.5 inches, no more than 0.25 inches thick. As of January 2025, a standard letter costs $0.73 for the first ounce; a large envelope costs $1.50. Get the size wrong and your postage more than doubles overnight. A business services team catches that before you print 2,000 pieces, not after. A marketplace seller isn't going to catch it at all.

Compare that to buying from random online sellers with no phone number and no one to call when a delivery goes sideways. I'm not saying marketplace sellers are bad. Most of them aren't. But when something goes wrong, a structured account with a real contact will save you days of chasing automated ticket systems.

My take on support: it depends on your volume. If you're buying once a quarter, ad-hoc is honestly fine. If you're buying monthly, the perks and access pay for themselves.

So Who Should Choose Which?

Here's how I'd decide—and it's the same logic I wrote into our procurement checklist.

Choose the structured account if you order office supplies or printed materials at least once a month. The pricing is clearer, the print services hold up, and you have a human to talk to when something goes wrong.

Go ad-hoc if you're a freelancer or micro-business with rare, tiny orders. The perks won't move the needle, and the flexibility of buying from whoever has the lowest price genuinely matters at that volume.

Either way, do the math. Use an overtime calculator to price your own procurement hours. Check a scrap gold calculator before selling old equipment. The discipline of checking numbers before accepting them is the same discipline that prevents purchase mistakes—and it would have saved me the $3,200 I lost.

And next time you wonder if Office Depot went out of business? No. They just got smarter about who they're selling to. Whether that works for you depends on how you buy.