Along with all my negatives were some mail-in envelopes from York Labs; must have been a favorite of mine.

Just crazy to see the prices. Rolls of film for $2.99. Developing with prints for a roll of 36: $3.00.

You can think back to that time, and everyone developed film: Safeway, Sears, K-mart, Fotomat, Kodak. There were little one-hour processing booths in parking lots that would take your film. Every convenience store sold film.

The comment about “we now process Seattle FilmWorks” film brings back a memory of that film needing special processing.

(much time goes by as Cliff looks up the history of Seattle FilmWorks…)

I had to look it up: Seattle FilmWorks bought bulk Kodak 35mm color motion picture film (Kodak 5247 and Kodak 5294) and loaded it into 35mm still camera cartridges. So your normal one-hour photo lab wanted nothing to do with it because of the rem-jet removal.

They had a crazy deal where they would send you a free roll of film if you sent it back to them and paid for processing; they’d send you another free roll. I think I can remember getting caught up into that for a while. At their peak, they employed 800 people and processed 20 miles of film every day.

Another trick was that because they used motion picture film, they could give you negatives, prints, and slides. They could make positive transparencies from the film and give you all three.

Later they started selling C-41 film at the same time, so if you find a roll now, you just don’t know how to process it. I’ve seen Reddit threads on this exact dilemma.

Anyway, a fun little time capsule.