Professionals in the Dallas Fort Worth area recently received a letter from BWC lab, a mainstay for years in the professional and demanding amateur processing and printing market. I always open lab letters first because I am almost 100-percent assured it is not a bill, and I am curious as to whether it is another announcement of going out of business or going up in pricing.
BWC generated a nice letter saying they had not increased prices on certain areas of their processing in ten years and in the current market of increasing expense, they were going up on some processing prices. My economics immediately kicked in and made me wonder, with decreasing demand do you really want to RAISE prices? My curiosity got the best of me, so I flipped the page over to see the new price grid, and what was the shocking news - a blank sheet of paper! OK, am I the only one who thinks a company has a problem when it is sending out blank sheets of paper? And why had they not increased prices for ten years? That seems a little strange.
BWC does have a great service that converts digital files to slides and that is what my studio will be offering for doing student art portfolios. It is impossible to beat having one exact exposure, with perfect lighting and at a higher quality than 35-mm film, but that is the future. One set of slides and digital files is impossible to beat. So, I called BWC to see what pricing is for this service, and once they quoted it to me, I asked them if their "good customers" had a better rate. He looked me up and informed me, after looking at my account history, that I had done 122-dollars in 2004 and 26-dollars thus far this year. After a big laugh, the full weight of what he said began to sink in. In two short years, I have gone from thousands of dollars at BWC to dozens. Frightening for them.
We can only hope BWC is around for a long time to come. It is easy to imagine a Mad-Max-Road-Warrior scenario in the future: We finally get our hands on a roll of film, shoot it, and now have to find a lab to process it. We hear about some guy hidden away somewhere who just might - might - have the machine, and a few precious drops of the chemistry that makes it all GO. We finally find him in a run down old strip mall ... sleeves rolled up, unshaven and unbathed ... he dusts off the machine with a blow from his nicotine addled lungs ... "Yep, I can do it - it'll cost you one thousand dollars, or ten gallons of petrol."
FEEL FREE TO THINK
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