Sorry, but if society wanted you to recycle toner cartridges, it'd be easy, or at least take a reasonable effort, to do so. When it takes more than a reasonable effort to recycle, it's trash. (With a caveat, enumerated below.)
I still change my own oil. And I take the old oil to any Autozone (there's one only a few blocks away) and they recycle for free. The same for car batteries. That's the way it should work.
One question, though: If you did not expect remuneration, that is, if you just took a bunch of toner cartridges to them and said "please take them", would they? If so, then do that and stop complaining about it. There's no way brick-and-mortar stores can compete with online, so any reasonable discount they give for a returned cartridge (which doesn't have a lot of value) will still not compete with online. That's a fact of life. To me, it'd be enough just to get the cartridges out of my life.
Here in Oregon, we have a thing that's still known as "the bottle bill" (although it's long since been law). Great idea, STUPID implementation. The machines have to read the bar code in order to give you your deposit back, which means you can't crush them ahead of time to save space, and you have to feed them into the stupid machine one........ at....... a........ time..... (There is usually one "bin" sorter but it's big and complicated and usually out of order.)
And so, it being a time consuming hassle to return the empties, for a long while I just accepted deposit as an additional tax and threw them away. Screw you Bottle Bill.
But later, I came up with a better solution. I bag them and when I have three or four 55 gallon trash bags full, I go by the local grocery on the way to work, find someone obediently putting their cans in one at a time, and say hey... would you like these? No, thank you! And they're Out Of My House, which (this is the important part) is the whole point. And who knows, I might have made some homeless person's day.
So, if it's too far away or if they make you jump through too many hoops to get rid of your toner cartridges, consider the trash can. But if you're holding out for a better discount, you're kinda missing the point. Man up and donate the damned things and be done with them.