This would have been an excellent time for Kodak to demonstrate a commitment to the customer, make a statement about their commitment to quality. They took a pass.
I work for a chemical company with less than a 200 million dollar market cap. If our products have even the possibility of impacting the customer, we take full action to get them back. Why? Because we have busted our ass to establish our brand as standing for a quality product. All it takes is ONE incident to get a black eye in the industry and customers will look at us with totally different eyes. Therefore, we have a quality process that is constantly vigilant. If we find a problem and the customer is still oblivious to it, we take action to notify them, get the defective product back, and replace it with product we have confidence in that won't compromise our quality.
I'm not going to argue this. There's no point, because it makes absolute sense. I myself have had to issue DO NOT FLY THIS AIRCRAFT warnings to customers when necessary. However, I would hazard a guess that your company knows each individual customer, especially if you deal with industrial chemicals or some such. I know all my customers whose planes we work on, because every day we take their very lives in our hands. Kodak does not have that luxury. Heck, when a store asks my phone number I always give a fake one.
It is unthinkable that we would have identified a product that has a known defect and the potential to impact a customer and just sit on our hands. Unthinkable!
All I can see is Vizzini as played by Wallace Shawn: Inconceivable!
What announcement? Has there been one? Can you provide a link to a Kodak Alaris site that notifies customers of this potential issue? You cannot. I see NONE and so instead of Kodak notifying customers about this issue, they are sitting on their hands, hoping no one will notice. Only people with direct access to Kodak Alaris employees are getting an announcement and replacement film. Is Kodak respecting its customers acting this way? I think not.
I cannot provide a link. I don't shoot Kodak often because it's considerably more expensive than the Arista.edu I've been using and which I like very much. So I've not really been paying that much attention to it, and I do not know the scope of how many bad rolls were distributed compared to how many total rolls were distributed. I would need that information to make a fully informed statement, and I cannot do that. That said, my own belief is that if Kodak had issued a notification, it would have been tantamount to a general recall. And regardless of how many people your small chemical company doesn't blow up each year -- and how my small aircraft service center doesn't crash each year -- I still believe that a general recall by Kodak was NOT necessary, but dealing with the problem on a case-by-case basis was the best way to go. Respecting its customers? Make a good product, sell it at a reasonable price and deal with me fairly when I have an EXISTING problem, that's all I need.
This was an appalling decision by Kodak Alaris. You are 100% right, this was a business decision. A decision was made to A) Make no public statements that there was a potential problem and B) Make no attempt at getting film known to be suspect off the shelves. The decision was made to sacrifice quality and the customer in exchange for keeping costs low. Sometimes you have to eat costs in order to save your customers a problem. Kodak Alaris had that opportunity and quietly declined to stand behind their product's quality.
Appalling? I don't know. "Appalling" to me would be, for example, General Motors' ignition switch debacle and its refusal to acknowledge fault even though it had known the cars were dangerous for at least ten years, or Guidant's implanted defibrillator disaster. That's "appalling." "Appalling" hurts or kills people. This is really, in the grand scheme of things, relatively minor. My interpretation of the decision is that it was not to sacrifice quality; from my standpoint, I believe the decision was made to reduce the impact on BOTH the customer and Kodak, in that customers who had purchased the bad film would notify Kodak about it anyway, and those who hadn't got defective rolls would happily shoot those films and then when they heard about the problem they would have said, "Well, I didn't have a problem," thereby leaving hundreds of thousands or millions of perfectly serviceable rolls of film in circulation and dealing individually with the bad ones.
Kodak's decision made many people unhappy, I gather. But a business decision is a business decision and they are the ones who bear the brunt of the consequences of that decision. They have their people who are paid to look at the numbers and determine what percentage of failure is acceptable. and that is the decision they made. Your decision is now whether to continually jump up and down like a Jack Russell Terrier yelling Kodak's BAD! Kodak's BAD! and get out the torches and pitchforks, or to keep shooting, deal with it, stop buying Kodak film or not, and move on. If it makes you that upset, there are myriad different other films and makers you can patronize.
And, by the way, as I have said, I don't shoot Kodak film often, so I'm definitely not a shill for Kodak. I had a problem with TWO frames on ONE roll of Ektar 100 and I today received a box of five rolls of Ektar 100 from Kodak Alaris. I do not know anyone at Alaris; in fact, before I started this thread, I didn't even know that Alaris EXISTED. I did not ask for replacement film. The representative merely asked my address and sent me a box. I would certainly call that "taking care of the customer." But now I'm going to have to go shoot some more color. Damn!
Why don't you go do the same?
PS-- It should be "duly noted," not "dually noted" unless you're driving a big American pickup with a single four-wheel axle in the rear.
