Would Kodak get back into the instant film business?

Don_ih said:

Good luck getting your photos developed in any grocery store I went to in the 1980s. Half the time, we mailed our film to York photo. Got it back in a month. Minilabs started rolling out in the early 80s but they weren't immediately adopted by grocery chains. Mid 80s, we could go to Black's in a mall and get photos developed in an hour. That mall was an hour's drive away. The local drug store never did offer any service faster than one week (and it cost more than York photo).
Anyway - what does any of this matter? That technology (the minilab) is what pushed the possibility of cheap, fast prints onto the public. The public doesn't want prints, anymore. They want photos on their phone. Film will never -- never ever -- dislodge that convenience. That day is done - doesn't matter how cheap you make film.

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Maybe things rolled out quicker in the USA. We used to drop off at the drug store, we had chains of photo labs, groceries, and others. My grandparents mailed out their photos to official Kodak labs because that's what they always did.

Cholentpot said:

Maybe things rolled out quicker in the USA. We used to drop off at the drug store, we had chains of photo labs, groceries, and others. My grandparents mailed out their photos to official Kodak labs because that's what they always did.

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Minilab was booming in the early 80's in the USA. In fact I managed one in Northern Virgina.

Chan Tran said:

In fact I managed one in Northern Virgina.

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Did you manage one in a grocery store?

Don_ih said:

Did you manage one in a grocery store?

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No! The lab was in a mall and it's a stand alone store. The business was good (made me wish that I could afford to open one on my own). I processed between 60 to over 100 rolls per day and plus enlargement and some copy work. .

Chan Tran said:

Minilab was booming in the early 80's in the USA. In fact I managed one in Northern Virgina.

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Right. I forgot about the labs in the mall 'Drop off, shop and pick up!' Did you sell film too or just develop? Any memory of what films moved the fastest and how much the going price was?

Cholentpot said:

Right. I forgot about the labs in the mall 'Drop off, shop and pick up!' Did you sell film too or just develop? Any memory of what films moved the fastest and how much the going price was?

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Well I even sell some P&S cameras. I don't remember the models now but we had some Fujifilm cameras. We never sold any of them though. People just didn't buy cameras from us (besides our prices are higher than a camera store). We did sell a lot of film and we pushed Fuji I guess the owner had a deal with Fuji but the customers bought more of the Kodacolor 100, 200 and 400. We offered print from slides but we did internegative and printed on EP-2 (now it's RA-4) material. The film as I remembered was about $3 a roll. The processing I think was high compared to drugstores. We charged $3.00 for film developing and $0.30 a 3.5x5" print.

Chan Tran said:

Well I even sell some P&S cameras. I don't remember the models now but we had some Fujifilm cameras. We never sold any of them though. People just didn't buy cameras from us (besides our prices are higher than a camera store). We did sell a lot of film and we pushed Fuji I guess the owner had a deal with Fuji but the customers bought more of the Kodacolor 100, 200 and 400. We offered print from slides but we did internegative and printed on EP-2 (now it's RA-4) material. The film as I remembered was about $3 a roll. The processing I think was high compared to drugstores. We charged $3.00 for film developing and $0.30 a 3.5x5" print.

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$2.98 for the good stuff! 24, 36 was a little more. Pushing Fuji sounds right to me, Kodak was the Coca-Cola to Fuji's Pepsi.

I worked in a department store in the early to mid 1980s, and our photofinishing supplier gave our customers 24 hour turn-around during the week - basically so we could compete with the mini-labs.
They were cheap, and reasonably competent, even if pro-lab user me would sometimes grimace a bit when I reviewed the results with the customers.
As far as film sales, there were probably three leaders.
1) pre-paid processing Kodachrome at $11.99 CDN IIRC. We were a Kodak pickup and delivery dealer, so we had 24 hour turn-around on Kodak processing during the week on this as well;
2) the normal variety in emulsions and formats of Kodak amateur films that one might find at a busy camera/film department in a busy store in a big, busy Canadian city. I have no clear memory of those prices, but $5 or less wouldn't surprise me; and
3) house brand print film (mostly) that was actually made for the department store chain by 3M/GAF/Ferrania. It was very inexpensively priced - about 2/3 of the Kodak prices, IIRC.
Most people who tried out the house brand film eventually switched to Kodak. If you saw the prints made from it by our photofinisher, you would understand why. I never recommended it.
We also sold some Polaroid SX-70 film, plus some Ektachrome. I can't remember ever having any black and white film available, but we might have. We also sold some truly awful house brand or GAF branded E6 processing slide film.
Most of the film was displayed in a wall of film behind the main counter, and we were constantly having to replenish that wall from the boxes and boxes of inventory that arrived frequently in the back room.
A wall that looked a bit like the old setup at Beau Photo in Vancouver, seen here:


It was all part of the Kodak ecosystem that, by its zenith, "manufacture(d) upwards of 70 master stockrolls a day of Kodacolor…each and every day – enough to make nearly 3.4 million spools each day".
The remnants of that ecosystem is what Eastman Kodak is today, and their master rolls - the minimum volume they can economically and practically make - are probably still enough to make nearly 50,000 individual still rolls of film.
It wouldn't surprise me if our absolutely ordinary and unremarkable camera and film department - far from a major player at the time - sold more film back then then B&H, Freestyle or any of the major retail sellers. Certainly more than Amazon.

MattKing said:

I have no clear memory of those prices, but $5 or less wouldn't surprise me; and

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So about $20-25 a roll in today's prices.

Cholentpot said:

$2.98 for the good stuff! 24, 36 was a little more. Pushing Fuji sounds right to me, Kodak was the Coca-Cola to Fuji's Pepsi.

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I actually didn't see the price of film went up from the early 80's until the 21st century. I feel the price went up sharply after 2010 or so. Up until 2010 or so I could get Ektar 100 for $5.

Chan Tran said:

No! The lab was in a mall

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Right. It was numerous years before the minilab machines moved into grocery stores and so on to produce quick prints for shoppers. But the entire trend - starting with stand-alone places in malls - helped drive the massive film sales of the 90s.

@Cholentpot - film was not seen as expensive in the 70s and 80s. It was seen as valuable but also not something you bought a lot of. It was not used frivolously by people (for the most part). People valued the photos they got more than whatever they spent on them. If they wanted good photos, they paid someone to take them.

Now people don't think you should spend anything on a photo.