No problem. It's just that, having been in the photofinishing business for a couple of years, there is a lot of burden to it that makes it difficult to see as something so simple as it seems.
Chemical photofinishing is a labor intensive process regardless of whether you are processing and printing the film, or relying upon machinery to do so. It's a customer service intensive business which requires a good bit of space and personnel to manage inventory, sell services and products, and run the equipment (if you're doing the processing in-house). Photofinishing is reliant upon volume to be profitable—although that $1.50 per roll price I quoted earlier in the thread was real in 1984, it was dependent upon an average of twenty to thirty rolls per day of processing demand to achieve it. Any average under that and the cost per roll grows rapidly to an unprofitable level because the machines must be maintained, the chemistry kept fresh and in spec, and the inventory maintained regardless of whether you're processing anything or not.
From what I see of the current film usage and demographics, I don't see enough photofinishing business existing in today's market for anything other than mail-order only, batch-oriented operations at significantly higher costs. The best that Leica might do is find a couple of high-quality providers, certify them to meet output quality specifications, and offer mailers with the Leica brand and quality certification.
This is analogous to what Apple does with the Photos app when you order prints or books, and it works well ... but there is a deep and pretty complex set of mechanisms behind it that ensure smooth operations. That's a very expensive infrastructure to develop and, like photofinishing itself, is heavily dependent upon volume to be profitable.
G
I certainly would not discount any of that. My thinking was somewhat along other lines, that it occasionally might prove much better to create a market than to limit one's thinking to simply trying to tap into an existing one, especially if all you are doing is sitting on your hands and watching that market disappear.
As others have noted, when out shooting with a film camera, it is is extremely common to have a stranger remark "can you still get film for that?" etc.
Professional photofinishing is in a death spiral; anything which could raise the public's awareness that you can, in fact, "still get film for that" would not hurt.
If you are circling the drain, perhaps swimming won't help, perhaps it will, but choosing not to swim only has one result.
Even though Leica is small in comparison to Nikon, or Sony, the cost of doing something like this would still amount to nothing more than a rounding error, I would guess, even if it were done as a loss leader.
Of course, there is the possibility that Leica is not that interested in film any longer. Not being accusatory, perhaps they should not be. Maybe they are growing by leaps and bounds doing it their way.
But, if they were interested, the effort to insert into people's consciousness the idea that film is actually a real thing, and we do it here, could not be a bad thing.
40 years ago someone told me that "you won't sell it, if you don't have it on the shelf." Not sure that is any less true today.
