It was down in “Clareville” — the “Village” in Claremont, right near the south end of campus and, neatly enough, my dorm. I just needed some fliers copied.
At the time, Kinko’s was first and foremost a copy shop, specializing, in this case, in college traffic — copying papers, handouts for profs, etc. I had no idea, in fact, that it wasn’t just a local shop until I ran across another one, post-graduation. in another town.
Over the years, it grew up into more of a print shop, then started adding in design work and graphics workstations and package shipping and all sorts of office-related services. They were bought by FedEx a few years back … became “FedEx Kinko’s” …
… and now they’re all being turned into “FedEx Office” stores.
*sigh*
There seem to be two reasons for the change. An obvious one is to drop the cutsie name and try and be more of a Serious Business Store. The background reason is that FedEx plans to write off over $800MM from the original purchase due to the loss of the “valuable” Kinko’s name, making the return on the investment look a lot better than it has been.
So, in the end, the name didn’t really fail. It just wasn’t needed any more.
Bye, Kinko’s.
(via kottke)
And yet it will be one of those “Old Timer” things in the near future as we will still refer to it as Kinko’s.
Yuppers.