Nicholas O. Lindan wrote:
Scenario: Too keep the price at $4/roll, the machine
needs to make 10,000,000 rolls per run. You can
only sell 5,000,000 by the expiry date. Two solutions:
trash 5,000,000 rolls or sell the extra 5,000,000
at the marginal price and drive Efke, Foma and anyone
else in the market into bankruptcy. Doesn't take a
Harvard MBA. A bit beyond the comprehension of LSE,
though.

One thing that most people don't understand is that the expiration
date is not a hard and fast thing. That's why food is often marked
"best if used by", not "destroy without opening".

Color film shifts with age, high speed film is fogged by cosmic rays,
but lower speed black and white film ages gracefully. If Kodak for
example had a large roll of uncut Tri-X in it's cave that reached it's
expiration date, there would be nothing wrong with cutting it into
35mm rolls and selling it to someone else. Or selling it uncut.

As long as they did not dilute their brand name, it's "cheap money".

In that case it would have to be sold as "similar to the yellow box
400 speed film" and have a different imprint. As long as they did not
say it was Tri-X, there would be nothing wrong with it.

For example, if I were a billionare (which there is little chance
of that ever happening), I would buy a production run of Panatomic-X.
Kodak would gladly make it for me, and I'm sure I could sell hundreds
of rolls of it. Too bad I'd have to sell a lot more to break even.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel N3OWJ/4X1GM