Not Too Much Double Exposure In This Film Town People Of Rochester, N.Y., Remain Strongly Loyal To Kodak

Wegmans, the biggest and glitziest grocery store chain in town, stocks 215 different cold cereals, 23 brands of toothpaste and even four kinds of caviar.

Photographic film comes in little yellow boxes. Not green ones.

This is, after all, Kodak Country, where Japanese rivals like Fuji get little respect - and, in nearly all the supermarkets and drugstore chains, no space on the shelves.

“The last thing we’d want to do would be to offend our customers,” said Wegmans spokeswoman Jo Natale.

While not as numerous as a generation ago, but Eastman Kodak’s 34,000 employees and 24,000 retirees still pack a punch in this metropolitan region of nearly 1 million people.

Requests for Fuji film are so rare, “you couldn’t count them,” Natale said. “We offer the products people want to buy.”

Kodak chief executive George M.C. Fisher reckons that in 85 percent of U.S. stores where film products are sold, “right alongside Kodak, you will find Fuji.”

But Rochester “is not the norm for the U.S.,” he said. “If the town’s livelihood depended on Kodak, I think you would think twice about carrying a competitive brand, too.”

Kodak contends Tokyo-based Fuji has rigged the Japanese photographic market to keep foreign competitors out. Kodak’s market share there is 9 percent to Fuji’s 70 percent, while in the U.S. market, Fuji’s bite is 12 percent.

But in George Eastman’s backyard, where photography was made accessible to the masses in the 1880s, Fuji’s presence is negligible, largely confined to specialty shops like Scott’s Photo, a few blocks from Eastman House.

Although fewer than one in 10 customers will opt for Fuji over Kodak film, photo stores are obliged to offer more than one brand, said owner Scott Sims.

“The serious photographer demands that we do,” he said.

Some customers will mutter, “‘I wish my grocery store, drugstore closer to home had Fuji,’ but that’s the way it goes,” Sims said. “Obviously a larger chain operation looks at pure numbers.”

And territorial loyalties.

Fuji says its film is popular in Japan largely because it’s better known and home-produced.

In the same way, Kodak’s hometown dominance “is natural and understandable,” said Fuji spokesman Tom Shays.

But “while we understand the sensitivities in Rochester, by the same token there’s lots of Kodak film available in Tokyo and, as an example, in Greenwood, S.C., where we have a lot of factories,” Shays said.

Frank Cicha, 56, who owns a video-transfer business here, uses both film brands, all the time comparing price and service. “I don’t believe in blind loyalty,” he said.

But, he said, “I admire Wegmans for being loyal to Kodak.”

Doris Adamek, who has relatives working at Kodak, is true to the hometown brand.

“My husband won’t buy Japanese cars - how can I buy Fuji film?” she asks.