take a look at filemaker pro.

Ultimate Mail Manager, and a used laser printer.

You're not kidding.  When I first started working for my current employer, they were spending over $50 per day on ink jet cartridges.  $50 per day with only 24 employees is a heck of a lot of waste.  I put an end to that pretty quickly.

For the price, you can't beat a dot matrix.  We're spending roughly about 1/10 now for ribbons that we were for toner cartridges when we tried our failed laser printer experiment.  The initial cost of the printer is also much, much less (if you compare heavy duty lasers to heavy duty dot matrix printers).  While I wouldn't print a letter with one, the quality is perfectly acceptable for mail labels.  If buying used, some of the old IBM printers are very sturdy.  The models with 9-pin printheads will last longer than the ones with 24, although you do sacrifice some quality for longevity.  If buying new, Lexmarks are a good buy for the price.

We do mailings for several local companies, and have given-up on inkjets and lasers.  The last three laser printers we had lasted less than three months.  A Lexmark 2380 we bought three years ago is still going strong.  We print mail labels with it continuously about four hours per day.  With an older Lexmark (don't remember the model), we print three-part invoices at a rate of about 2 per minute for around 7 hours per day, six days per week!  As far as I know (assuming someone hasn't swapped around the printers without telling me), it's printed over a million pages.  The rate we're printing is about 25% greater than its rated duty-cycle, but it's still going strong.  Even the nicer HP laser printers we had were dying when printing only about 20,000 pages per month.  You just can't beat a dot matrix when it comes to printing mail labels.

You might be able to find someone that has a dot matrix they'll give away, so the initial cost is $0.

The other cost is the labels.  I haven't priced laser labels in a while, but when I last did, they were several times the cost of the dot matrix ones.  The laser ones have to handle the heat from inside the printer and handle the curved paperpath, so that's why they're more expensive.z