I still remember my first Kinko’s

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)