Store closings
Posted by Nathaniel.
During Kirsten’s pregnancy, I took a picture of her every week with my large-format camera to trace how everything was developing. Back when I lived in Seattle, it was a short walk to the best photo lab in town and I built some professional relationships there and have been mailing them my film for the last 7 years. On Friday, I got the box with the most recent pictures of Kirsten back in the mail with a stamp saying “package returned, company out of business”.
It’s really kind of crazy how odd this seems. The lab had been in existence for 30 years before I started using them and they’ve processed nearly every one of my photos. (Including the photos that I’ve taken at different points of all of you.) Now it’s just gone and it’s almost like it took a piece of my childhood with it.
It’s really a very odd experience. And it means that I have to find a new photolab before they all go out of business.
July 31st, 2008 at 10:25 am Using
I think I know how you feel, except not in a photo-development sort of way really. It seems like every time I go home for a holiday or something one of my favorite stores or restaurants goes under. All the baseball card stores that my brothers and I used to flock to as kids are long closed, some of the best college bars have gone under, the pizza place that gave me my first job is now a crazy Mexican restaurant, my favorite record store went under probably 6 years ago and the space has been vacant ever since … And now for the big unpleasant ‘no-shit’ where we realize that things change … Finding a good photo lab nowadays could present some problems though. Good luck with that. (BTW, the camera store in Hanover finally went out of business and is now a high end furniture and Nepalese rug store. Haha)
August 1st, 2008 at 4:23 pm Using
I found out the story on my photo store. In the last ~5-10 years they got into large-format printing pretty heavily doing trade show booths, billboards, large full-color banners, etc. Sometime recently, a larger company that specialized in lower-end but similar products realized they could cover the entire market if they bought the lab I used a lot. In the course of the merger, they decided that the new company should focus solely on the large commercial printing and all the film processing went out the window.
The thing that I don’t really understand is why the very skilled photo printers and film developing people who just lost their jobs didn’t put in an offer on all the now unneeded equipment and start up a smaller company to only do processing and photo printing. Haha, it’s probably because most of them were kind of lazy hippies and not entrepreneurs.
With Hanover Camera gone, is there anywhere in the upper valley to buy camera gear? I can’t even think of a Ritz camera or anything like that. I guess it’s Best Buy, Walmart, or mail order. Haha, I’m not shedding any tears over that place being gone, their prices were insane and the service wasn’t good enough to make up for it. It’s good to hear that Hanover has another place to buy high-end furniture and Nepalese rugs though. I was sweating it for a little bit when I thought about the limited number of places you could do that.