A Tale of Two Flower Cities

[captainsblog]

Lots of bylines coming out of Rochester in the national news over the past few days. The differences between them tell you a lot about where things stand back there.

Up in the vast wastelands of the hallways of Kodak Office, the news this week is bad. The price of the company's shares, once a mainstay of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, is now in the double digits- pennies, not dollars- and the stock is at risk of being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange, which will be academic if the whole company winds up in Chapter 11, as virtually everybody now thinks it will.

Can't say I'm surprised. For more than 25 years, I've dealt with various manifestations of the Great Yellow Father: employees at many levels, management types, occasionally their accounts payable and benefits reps, and lots of former employees. Most, if not all, exuded senses of the attitude that for decades defined Rochester as Smugtown.  They seemed shocked, SHOCKED, when a "lifetime" job, or a "lifetime" benefit, seemingly got taken away from them through no fault of their own, even though they'd never dared, in all their years on the job, to complain, or unionize, or do anything imaginative or innovative.  It became a game, in my final years living there and the almost 20 years since leaving, to be able to spot the Kodakers in the checkout lines at the grocery store, just through their senses of entitlement and dependency aimed at the store workers and fellow customers surrounding them.

Kodak had the inside tracks on in-store photo finishing, on instant photography, and on digital technology. It screwed up each and every one of them, in favor of maintaining their 1940-1960s cash cow of "You press the button, we do the rest" until it was, pretty much, too late. Their total demise won't kill the Upstate economy any more than their large partial demise has over the past 20 years or so, but it still lies ahead with a sense of sadness and would-could-shoulda. If the company had embraced new technologies instead of turtling; if it had gone the other way and supported legacy brands like Kodachrome instead of killing it off; if it had celebrated its support for the arts, and its employees, and its home town in an era where such things became corporate anathema? The Big Yellow Box might have produced lower P/E ratios, but still produced more national loyalty, and interest in its name, than its last decade of stumbling has on the way to what now seems to be its inevitable Big Yellow Graveyard:(

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Several miles to the southwest, in corporate offices on Brooks Avenue, are a much happier bunch of executives- who got it wrong, and in a wink of an eye turned things around and made it right.

Earlier this week, Wegmans announced it was suspending its series of holiday ads featuring Alec Baldwin, reacting to his December kerfuffle on an American Airlines flight where he allegedly refused to turn off his mobile during a gate delay.  Within hours of a viral backlash, the chain listened, learned, and reversed itself:

Wegmans Food Markets, responding to “hundreds and hundreds” of complaints, today said it would resume the Alec Baldwin television ads that it pulled last month.

The company had discontinued the final week of a three-week run of holiday ads featuring Baldwin...

Today, Natale said the missing commercials would be aired in response to even greater criticism about the cancellation. Besides comments the company received, an online petition begun by a Syracuse-area actress, Rita Worlock, to reinstate the ads had attracted several hundred signers by this morning.

”We regret ending the Alec Baldwin holiday commercials one week earlier than planned in response to a couple of dozen complaints. We have decided to run the commercials again, effective immediately,” Natale said in an emailed statement.

“Clearly, many more people support Alec, as evidenced by the hundreds and hundreds of tweets, emails and phone calls we have received. We enjoyed working with Alec Baldwin and his mom, Carol, and would do it again. We appreciate all the kind things they have said about Wegmans and respect the good work they do for communities.”

Viral is as viral does. Danny and his top-level employees clearly appreciated that the Baldwin campaign began entirely independently of anything that he, or Jay Advertising, or any other suit envisioned, but came out of a heartfelt appearance by Alec on Letterman, where he passed on his mother's extolling of the chain's virtues. While the chain did knee-jerk in response to the bad publicity of the airline affair, its retraction also showed an ability to control that knee movement, listening to its fans and remembering what was important to them about Alec's endorsement in the first place.

If Kodak had been as attentive to the needs of its customers throughout the past 30 years, instead of ignoring, avoiding and ostriching, it likely wouldn't be in the financial pickle it finds itself in now.  And if they do wind up under the protection of the federal law I've made a career out of for almost those same 30 years, all I can wish, as they say across town, is that Every Day, They Get Bankruptcy's Best.

Comments

[tilia-tomentosa.livejournal.com]

I remember the craving I had for a little Kodak film camera in those post-communist but still pre-digital days, but there was no way I could afford one. Ah, second-world problems. :)

Where did the dream go? I never thought of Kodak when I started craving for a better digital camera.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

I never thought of Kodak when I started craving for a better digital camera.

The problem is, neither did they.

I'd posted about this a year or so ago, and of course can't find it now, but here's another link to the story (http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-obama-rewards-digital-camera-microprocessor.html) about the President's awarding of a Medal of Technology to the inventor of the digital camera:

Among the recipients was Stephen Sasson, an Eastman Kodak employee who in 1975 built the first prototype of the digital camera, an invention that enjoyed huge commercial success a quarter century later.

The original story I saw about it included a picture of the thing; it was about the size of a small copier, ran on about 12 car-size batteries and held about three pixels. But the concept was there, and instead of exploiting it, Kodak spent 20 years denying it.