Kodak always has been very regional. Their structure was always manufacturer - national organization - dealer. It is only very recently that they have had a web presence and a source of information that was international.
In Canada, historically, Kodak provided a lot of support to dealers, and would refer customer enquiries to those dealers. Even their scientific and technical divisions, such as medical imaging (X-Ray), would tend to have geographically focused representatives, that would operate out of the national organization, rather than internationally.
Kodak Canada used to be a great supporter of the small camera store - their pricing was such that if the store bought a reasonable quantity of materials, they would get the same pricing as the bigger dealers.
Any photographic dealer (even the smallest ones) could access any photographic item. You would therefore sometimes find situations where the corner drugstore in a small town stocked items that would otherwise be considered hard to find specialty items - because they were Kodak dealers, and they had customers who asked for them.
The extensive dealer network, and wide availability of a large number of products, and all of the dealer support depended of course on one factor - high margins. When the photographic business turned into a business where margins are slim and product decisions are made almost exclusively based on price, it was the death knell to this level of wide ranging support.
Even after the amateur market started becoming so low margin, there was still some meaningful margin in some of the professional markets, but with the advent of professional digital, and the other cost focussed market forces that are now in place, there is little opportunity for anyone to maintain a service oriented business with the scope and coverage that Kodak used to supply.
It used to be possible to earn a reasonable living and have a satisfying career in the retail photographic business. It is very difficult to do that now, because margins are thinner, support is more rare, and competition with web based retailers is far more intense than the competition with the mail order sellers of yesteryear.
Smaller, more flexible businesses supporting a niche market are possible, but they will never have the resources available to them to perform the research or develop the new products that big companies like Kodak had in the past.
It used to be that the economies of scale inherent in the large amateur photographic markets supported the smaller, more professional and technichal and artistic markets, and a synergy existed between the two, whereby technical improvements in one, tended to benefit the others. Work directed at improving professional products eventually bore fruit in the amateur markets as well, and the resulting cost savings in manufacture that flow from high volumes, benefitted all markets. The great tragedy of the rapid rise of the digital photographic medium is that the synergies are being lost, and the economies of scale are shrinking.
Kodak didn't decide to stop producing Black and White photographic paper simply because it became less profitable to produce that product - they decided to stop production because the whole system of production and marketing (including distribution) that had supported it in the past is disappearing. If few at the retail end are ordering the paper in quantity, and there are fewer and fewer commercial labs doing the work and using the product, then the costs of producing and marketing and improving and distributing the product become so great, relative to the sales, as to make it uneconomic. If there aren't other markets that benefit from existing synergies with the Black and White paper market, than it is difficult to continue in that market.
In years gone past, the hangers that David was looking for were more readily available, along with information about them, because the entire market for film and chemistry and paper and darkroom equipment supported that level of personal service, even from a company as big as Kodak (through their dealers).
It may be that in today's marketplace, only big box stores, web based retailers, and small niche market vendors will survive. That would be a tragedy.
