Sunset on Fotomat: 1978

I was a Fotomat Fotomate just a year before this! I had worked hard to train for it, and it was a pretty good job, overall. I had only worked there for a few months, though, when my husband graduated from college at BYU and we had to move to Lexington, Kentucky for grad school. Unfortunately, there was no Fotomat there. Only two years later, when we returned to Utah, Fotomat was just going under. I heard that the creator of it ran off with his secretary and the investor's money, or something on that order.

I thought the film was fine, and the service generally was, too. Sometimes, things were late coming back and people would yell at me, like they thought I had a darkroom in that little 6X6 building, and did the developing myself! There were dozens of imitators, for the few years that it was around. Every parking lot of any size had either a Fotomat or an imitator, for a few years, there.

It was something of a revolution, not having to wait a week for the pharmacy (or Kodak's mail-in service) to get your prints back to you.

But quality wasn't as much of a priority -- prints too dark, too light, or speckled with dust was the tradeoff for speed.

A nicely captured bit of modern history.

(Did anyone ever actually USE a roll of Fotomat-branded film?)