Moonachie, NJ – Unusual Clientele List Keeps New Jersey Typewriter Business Afloat

Moonachie, NJ – Despite decades-old predictions that the bulky machines would become obsolete, a New Jersey-based typewriter business remains lucrative thanks to an unusual clientele list—a list that includes police departments, government agencies, funeral parlors, and surprisingly, prisons.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (http://on.wsj.com/155mzsU) reports that Edward Michael, an executive at Swintec—a New Jersey-based company and one of the last remaining sellers of typewriters in the U.S.—said that, while most past uses for traditional typewriters have been phased out, there is still a healthy market for the company’s products due some remaining state laws which require their use in the processing of death certificates, marriage and birth certificates, and police department reports.

Michael said Swintec still sells, on average, between 3,000 and 5,000 typewriters annually.

Michael said that one of the company’s biggest sellers has been the “clear” typewriter, which the company developed specifically for prisons.

Conceived in the late 1990s, Michael said the clear typewriter has become a prison favorite because it prevents the smuggling of contraband traditionally associated with standard computer components.

According to Michael, Texas inmates, alone, have purchased over 1,500 Swintec typewriters since 2011, since prison officials allow them to have them in their cells because of their transparency.

“Things stick around long after you think they would have disappeared,” says Darren Wershler, a professor at Concordia University in Montreal, who has an extensive knowledge of typewriters.

Michael, who started at Swintec as a traveling salesman in 1985, said Swnitec has flirted with different product lines over the years, but remains committed to selling typewriters as long as there is a market.

“We’re typewriters,” said Michael. “This is our specialty. This is what we know.”