The front left corner itself is home to the store's photo center, which is in a very sad state with both kiosks out of order and the whole area fulled up with random junk and promotional displays. At least they have a lot of batteries! I have no clue if this is accurate or not, but I've long had a personal theory that one of the big factors in the decline of drugstores is the shift to digital photography and subsequent decreased interest in printed photos at all -- judging by how much floor space the likes of Rite Aid and Walgreens once dedicated to their photo departments, I imagine that was a fairly large part of their business, which is now all but gone.
Wow, this looks terrible! I'm sure the London Drugs photo department will look much better, but it is hard for anything to look worse. The two photo kiosks appear to be down and the film drop box has a bunch of junk blocking it. Although they appear to have a number of Duracell batteries (though no more than a Safeway would likely have), they don't have any Energizer batteries.
ReplyDeletePhoto departments were big business for drug stores as they specialized in one hour photos. Supermarkets and discount stores had photo finishing as well, but neither generally specialized in 1 hour photos until after the concept of one hour photo was already mature. Also, drug stores were generally known for having a large stock of film and audio/video cassette tapes. I don't know about this Rite Aid, but even to this day, some Walgreens and CVSes keep an inventory of film and audio cassettes/blank CDs.
Here in Houston, Eckerd put a lot of emphasis on their photo developing and not just their one hour photo lab. They had two send-away photo developing products which were really popular, System 2 which gave double prints and another one whose name escapes me (Ultralab 35 or something like that) which had the larger 4x6" prints. They had a quality guarantee and they had nicer negative sleeves than most places. They were a bit more expensive than supermarket and discount store send-away services, but they were perceived as being better. In my experience, Walgreens didn't match Eckerd's quality for photo developing.
The other photo shows a department sign using the word 'nourish' with the food department, but mostly what I'm seeing are alcoholic drinks and soft drinks...mostly cheap beer. This hardly seems like the most nourishing stuff around, lol.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that battery section (spread thin to make it look larger than it is) is where they would have had film and other assorted photo and electronics products up until a few years ago, along with the completely empty shelving on the other side. Rite Aid started to shrink their photo departments in the Green Wellness era, but it seems that they only truly gave up on photo stuff when they cut back on all sorts of products a few years back. I don't know about CVS, but Walgreens still does have a good bit of photo/electronics stuff, and it doesn't seem like they've been shrinking their photo departments in older stores at all.
DeleteBack in the film days, we typically got film developed at Costco, or sometimes Walmart (I think that was mostly if we wanted one-hour service for some reason). Since they switched to a digital camera (fairly late, but before most places discontinued film processing), they've generally used Walgreens when they want printed photos. None of us are particularly great photographers, so we never had any real complaints about the quality. 🙂
Yeah, that's Rite Aid for you. Especially these days, they don't sell a lot of groceries that aren't junk food. Even though Rite Aid once put prominent "Food Mart" signs on many of their stores, I don't remember ever buying serious groceries there -- unlike Walgreens, which used to frequently have good sales on groceries (even if the quality was sometimes lacking).
I still like to get pictures developed, but in recent years Walgreens' print quality has sucked. My theory is that this has to do with the printers not being able to keep up with the higher quality of digital photos -- my original theory, that it was just old printers at an old Walgreens, were squashed when I went to a newer-build store and got the same results...
ReplyDeleteRetail Retell, are you using the photo kiosks at Walgreens or are you uploading (or otherwise giving) your photo files to Walgreens and having them print it on their internal machines? It's possible that the self-serve kiosks print at a lower quality than what the photo lab can do if you give them your photo files and let them print it. I don't know if photos have to be uploaded online these days or if they'll take a flash drive/SD card and put it in an envelope like one used to do with film. I know that was possible back in the day, but I have not done digital prints that way since the mid-2000s.
DeleteI did use the CVS kiosk a few times about five years ago for something I was working on. It was hard enough even then to find a working kiosk and even then, as you experienced at Walgreens, the quality was just okay. My printer at home could probably come close to what the kiosk did, but at a higher cost. This didn't really matter for what I was doing, but it seems to me that the kiosks probably aren't the best way to do serious prints. That said, I don't know if a better way exists at places like Walgreens and CVS.
Hmm, I've never had major issues with Walgreens photo printing, but then again my standards probably aren't particularly high. I wouldn't be surprised if the newer-build store still had the same old equipment as other Walgreens -- they've certainly closed enough stores to be able to just move photo equipment around!
DeleteThe latter -- I upload my photos online, and they're ready for pickup the same day. I've never used one of their kiosks.
DeleteTrue -- this store technically was a relocation, I believe, so I guess it's possible the old equipment moved over!