< ned > kinko’s: revenge of the renegade hippies

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Given his trouble with reading, his mechanical ineptitude, and his kinky red hair, he realized early on that he wasn’t gigantically employable -- except by himself. While attending a succession of high schools in the San Fernando Valley -- his aversion to print made him restless, and his restlessness got him flung out over and over again -- he painted addresses on curbs. After managing to graduate -- barely! -- with a D average, he realized that if he didn’t think of something quick, he was apt to be doing his thinking in Viet Nam, and enrolled in a junior college. A year later, he was a sophomore at USC (his loving parents, who’d later observe that they’d spent $50 for every word he could read, had money). He failed to strike up an enduring friendship with O.J. Simpson, but there were enough other football players in his classes to keep the grading curve nice and low. He majored in finance and supplemented his own with a little roadside vegetable stand.

As the sixties ended, he moved to Santa Barbara, even though it meant driving back to L.A. a million times before he finally got his degree. With $5,000 he borrowed from the rebuilt -- and understandably solicitous -- Isla Vista branch of the Bank of America (which the applecheeked revolutionaries of the nearby University of California campus had recently torched to protest something or other), he rented either a 100-square-foot or 200-square-foot space at the back of either a taco stand or hamburger joint, depending on who’s doing the reminiscing, and leased a Xerox 2400 photocopier to go with his AB Dick 360 printing press. Soon the place was so crowded that Orfalea regularly had to wheel the Xerox out onto the sidewalk to make room. He spent his days bumping into those of his fellow renegade hippies he’d hired to run his various machines and his nights peddling spiral notebooks and ballpoint pens in the women’s dorms.

At the urging of the proprietor of the Sixpack Shop next door, he and his partners (those of the renegade hippies who’d agreed to work for a cut of the take rather than for a salary) published a line of fervently lowbrow posters, the most notable of which featured an enormously fat woman of local notoriety decked out in a bikini and pulltab necklace amid piles of Budweiser (and later, after Anheuser Busch threatened to sue, Bumfuck Brew) cans. Beer, the caption snickered, Has Something for Everybody. They sold out three editions, and Orfalea exhorted his partners to go forth and multiply, keeping in mind the relative ease with which they could achieve an equity position in his young company.

Multiply they did. His cousin Dennis Itule set up shop in Van Nuys, from whose high school Paul had once been expelled. Tim Stancliff followed suit in Boulder. Brad Krause, the hirsute surfer Orfalea had hired out of Santa Barbara City College to run his AB Dick, took Kinko’s up the Pacific Coast. And Jimmy Warren climbed into his VW van and made like photocopying’s Johnny Appleseed.

A quarter-century later, there are more Kinko’s copy shops than the company itself seems able to keep track of; the Fact Sheet its PR firm sends out, which speaks proudly of 725 stores, is printed on stationery bearing the inscription Over 600 locations nationwide right beside the 800 number at the bottom. There’s even a Kinko’s in Rotterdam. And the company now has what its extremely buttoned down spokeswoman calls A Presence in Japan, where “Kinko’s ” luckily translates as “a safe place to go to do things ” rather than, for instance, “a fertile breeding ground for incurable diseases.”

In the early going, when Orfalea’s partners were driving microbuses rather than Mercedes and the company saw the college student as its archetypal customer, things could hardly have been more laid back. If pink paint were on sale near a particular campus, the nearby Kinko’s would surely be pink. Beginning in the mid-70s, when the company realized that it might as well stay open to the public around the clock since it commonly had people working ’til dawn on gigantic rush jobs anyway, one could hang out at Kinko’s at any time of day or night. Not until 80 stores spanned the continent did it occur to anyone that the company should have an official color scheme.

Wearing a Kinko’s sweatshirt to Disneyland, an executive of the company would be hailed by visitors from Moscow, Idaho, say, who figured him to be a neighbor. Kinko’s was unique to Moscow, wasn’t it? Those days are long gone, though, as the nation’s independently owned shops -- no less than 85 percent of the 30,000 or so extant -- think more and more of Kinko’s as the Wal-Mart of copy shops, as a gluttonous bully in the face of whose advertising budget they have no prayer. Behold the renegade hippies having becomeÉthe Bane of the Little Guy.

In picturesque Sausalito, California, recently, the owners of eight printing, secretarial, and copy services griped to the city council on getting wind of Kinko’s plan to set up shop nearby. After Kinko’s, they wailed, the deluge. When they closed because all their customers had defected to Kinko’s, their places would surely be taken by Burger King and Taco Bell and Wendy’s and others unlikely to make the tourists glad they’d taken the ferry over from San Francisco.

In the face of which demurral, the company pointed out that it’s rarely the cheapest copy place in town, and asserted that many mom-’n’-pop shops actually find themselves doing more business after Kinko’s moves in around the corner, especially if they offer such services as offset printing and linotronic output, as Kinko’s, for all intents and purposes, does not.

The company likes to believe that its proliferation owes first to the great pride its co-workers (never “employees ”) take in keeping the customer beaming. One imagines that having been in the right place at exactly the right time -- that at which many companies realized the cost-ineffectiveness of maintaining their own copy centers -- might have had a little something to do with it too.

And some more of the company’s recent success surely owes to its having redefined itself as Your Branch Office That Never Closes just as most of the 38 million Americans who’d come to work out of offices in their homes were being let go by downsizing corporations. They may have come at first for the free paper clips and correction fluid, but they came back for the computers, which Kinko’s began renting out by the hour in the mid-80s after satisfying itself that the Macintosh 512 wasn’t apt to intimidate people as MS-DOS did. Within two years of the first Macs’ appearance (in Austin, Ft. Collins, Minneapolis, New Haven, and Knoxville), 200 stores had them, and countless thousands of Americans traipsed in to output their resumes on Laserwriters. Within a decade, there were more than 10,000 Macs and PC’s in the 725 or so Kinko’s stores.

A great many of them not state of the art. While Kinko’s has made it a practice to leave the bleeding edge of photocopy technology to the federal government, it’s had no such luxury with computers, and has learned the hard way -- from wholesale customer disgruntlement -- that it’s impossible to stay up-to-the-minute in the face of the standard two-year lease. Only in the latter half of 1994 did the company finally make 486’s (and Pentiums) widely available to IBM users. At the dawn of 1995, on the other hand, Mac users could use Power PC’s at the Kinko’s of their choice -- provided they chose one of a couple in Seattle.

Undeterred by oversized faxing’s having pretty much laid an egg, Kinko’s remains committed to Technological Advancement in other areas. Video conferencing, which 120 stores have come to offer since its introduction at the end of 1993, has proved popular not only with scowling persons in suits, but also, on such occasions as Mothers Day and Christmas, with families. Self-service modems, a Kinko’s electronic bulletin board (BBS) that will enable customers to transmit their documents without fear of having to interact with a moonlighting abstract expressionist with a nose ring are in the works, and so too are miniphoto labs. Any day now, the new generation of digital photocopiers will begin to appear, using scanners and laser engines instead of light lens technology.

Speaking of Seattle, as we were a moment ago, grunge isn’t exactly underrepresented among Kinko’s co–workers in big cities. If not because of its creative atmosphere and generous benefit package, then because its always-opennness can accommodate even the most bohemian biorhythms, the company attracts disproportionate numbers of artists, musicians, and other creative types.

All co-workers, bohemian and buttoned down alike, are urged to work on the computers when customers ain’t, but overseeing a desktop publishing area isn’t necessarily the glamorous occupation some of the photocopier jockeys might imagine. In-deed, get in a couple of customers who don’t really know what they’re doing, but who do know that they’re being charged in one-minute increments and a couple of others are discovering that different output devices may well have a very different concep-tion of what red is, or green, and you have the makings of a very stressful day.

On paper, at least one long time co-worker has noted, the company’s avowed policy of non-discrimination looks terrific, but the higher up you go, the whiter, the maler. And yet, there are ample signs that, as Paul Orfalea claims, Kinko’s is indeed genuinely committed to The Loftiest Ideals. On the cover of its video conferencing brochure, not only a white dude and an Asian scowl solemnly at the prospective customer, but a Wesley Snipes lookalike too. Nor can there be any mistaking that the hands on the cover of the Oversize Copies brochure are those of a person of African descent. ’They're an open-minded company,“ Mark Floegel of Greenpeace's Pulp and Paper Campaign, exulted in mid-1993 after Kinko’s agreed to switch from (carcinogenic) chlorine-bleached to oxygen-bleached white paper. “Kinko's has seen the light.”

The company’s high-mindedness didn’t do it much good, though, when a coalition of publishers including Harper Row and William Morrow sued it at the end of the 80s for photocopying excerpts from copyrighted books without permission and binding them into anthologies for college students and others. A lot of the books are out of print, Kinko’s argued, and “fair use” (for education, in this case) precludes prosecution under the copyright laws. Copying for educational purposes alone, the publishers countered, doesn’t justify not having secured our permission to reprint. Pay the plaintiffs $1.9 million in damages and legal fees, said the judge, and change your evil ways.

In the wake of which fiasco, the company seemed to become acutely conscious of the need for positive PR. In the spring of 1993, the 30 stores of Kinko’s of Ohio bought the state 3,000 seedlings, which the Department of Natural Resources had pronounced due recompense for all the copy paper it had used. Not to be outdone, Kinko’s of Arkansas gave the city of Fayetteville 819 grown trees -- a great many of which the city didn’t know quite what to do with. Come summer, Kinko’s of Salt Lake City reforested a nearby camping area that borer beetles had devastated.

And one was forever encountering mentions of the Kinko’s two blocks from the Capitol in Washington, D.C. in the national newsmedia. When Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala wanted in the spring of 1994 to throw a book party for her newly published pal the deputy secretary of Education with no suggestion of impropriety, she made copies of the invitation not on the White House’s fax machine, but at Kinko’s, where she was observed waiting in line, just as you or I. During the health insurance furor of the summer, when lots of congresspersons took to brandishing charts in the manner of Ross Perot, it wasthat selfsame grandchild of the renegade hippies’ Isla Vista print shop that enlarged them to C-SPAN’s specifications.

Chatting with a couple of the company’s Major Players, one notes that Kinko’s nearly 800 percent markup on double density diskettes, for instance, flies in the face of its avowed goal of Democratizing the Technology. Within 24 hours, the company’s founder and namesake himself has phoned to assure that he’ll look into the matter personally. (And he makes the call himself, with no secretary wondering rhetorically first if one will hold for Mr. Paul Orfalea, and then subjecting one to five minutes of the beautiful music of Christmas while the great man finishes his chat with Michael Ovitz.)

While on the line, Kinko’s heretofore media-shy kingpin reveals himself to have matters of far greater moment than the price of diskettes on his mind. He observes with nearly palpable indignation that the Japanese copy pictures of new buildings, while in this country, we copy lawsuits. He’s convinced that we in the West think in our ears, the Japanese in their eyes, and its pains him big time. Why, oh why, do we remain in the thrall of bullshit words -- words, words, words, words! -- on a piece of paper when it takes three pages of them to equal what the Japanese can do with one of pictograms?”

Behold the King of Copies seemingly yearning to have made fewer.




		Given his trouble with reading, his mechanical ineptitude, and his kinky red hair, he realized early on that he wasn’t gigantically employable -- except by himself. While attending a succession of high schools in the San Fernando Valley -- his aversion to print made him restless, and his restlessness got him flung out over and over again -- he painted addresses on curbs. After managing to graduate -- barely! -- with a D average, he realized that if he didn’t think of something quick, he was apt to be doing his thinking in Viet Nam, and enrolled in a junior college. A year later, he was a sophomore at USC (his loving parents, who’d later observe that they’d spent $50 for every word he could read, had money). He failed to strike up an enduring friendship with O.J. Simpson, but there were enough other football players in his classes to keep the grading curve nice and low. He majored in finance and supplemented his own with a little roadside vegetable stand. As the sixties ended, he moved to Santa Barbara, even though it meant driving back to L.A. a million times before he finally got his degree. With $5,000 he borrowed from the rebuilt -- and understandably solicitous -- Isla Vista branch of the Bank of America (which the applecheeked revolutionaries of the nearby University of California campus had recently torched to protest something or other), he rented either a 100-square-foot or 200-square-foot space at the back of either a taco stand or hamburger joint, depending on who’s doing the reminiscing, and leased a Xerox 2400 photocopier to go with his AB Dick 360 printing press. Soon the place was so crowded that Orfalea regularly had to wheel the Xerox out onto the sidewalk to make room. He spent his days bumping into those of his fellow renegade hippies he’d hired to run his various machines and his nights peddling spiral notebooks and ballpoint pens in the women’s dorms. At the urging of the proprietor of the Sixpack Shop next door, he and his partners (those of the renegade hippies who’d agreed to work for a cut of the take rather than for a salary) published a line of fervently lowbrow posters, the most notable of which featured an enormously fat woman of local notoriety decked out in a bikini and pulltab necklace amid piles of Budweiser (and later, after Anheuser Busch threatened to sue, Bumfuck Brew) cans. Beer, the caption snickered, Has Something for Everybody. They sold out three editions, and Orfalea exhorted his partners to go forth and multiply, keeping in mind the relative ease with which they could achieve an equity position in his young company. Multiply they did. His cousin Dennis Itule set up shop in Van Nuys, from whose high school Paul had once been expelled. Tim Stancliff followed suit in Boulder. Brad Krause, the hirsute surfer Orfalea had hired out of Santa Barbara City College to run his AB Dick, took Kinko’s up the Pacific Coast. And Jimmy Warren climbed into his VW van and made like photocopying’s Johnny Appleseed. A quarter-century later, there are more Kinko’s copy shops than the company itself seems able to keep track of; the Fact Sheet its PR firm sends out, which speaks proudly of 725 stores, is printed on stationery bearing the inscription Over 600 locations nationwide right beside the 800 number at the bottom. There’s even a Kinko’s in Rotterdam. And the company now has what its extremely buttoned down spokeswoman calls A Presence in Japan, where “Kinko’s ” luckily translates as “a safe place to go to do things ” rather than, for instance, “a fertile breeding ground for incurable diseases.” In the early going, when Orfalea’s partners were driving microbuses rather than Mercedes and the company saw the college student as its archetypal customer, things could hardly have been more laid back. If pink paint were on sale near a particular campus, the nearby Kinko’s would surely be pink. Beginning in the mid-70s, when the company realized that it might as well stay open to the public around the clock since it commonly had people working ’til dawn on gigantic rush jobs anyway, one could hang out at Kinko’s at any time of day or night. Not until 80 stores spanned the continent did it occur to anyone that the company should have an official color scheme. Wearing a Kinko’s sweatshirt to Disneyland, an executive of the company would be hailed by visitors from Moscow, Idaho, say, who figured him to be a neighbor. Kinko’s was unique to Moscow, wasn’t it? Those days are long gone, though, as the nation’s independently owned shops -- no less than 85 percent of the 30,000 or so extant -- think more and more of Kinko’s as the Wal-Mart of copy shops, as a gluttonous bully in the face of whose advertising budget they have no prayer. Behold the renegade hippies having becomeÉthe Bane of the Little Guy. In picturesque Sausalito, California, recently, the owners of eight printing, secretarial, and copy services griped to the city council on getting wind of Kinko’s plan to set up shop nearby. After Kinko’s, they wailed, the deluge. When they closed because all their customers had defected to Kinko’s, their places would surely be taken by Burger King and Taco Bell and Wendy’s and others unlikely to make the tourists glad they’d taken the ferry over from San Francisco. In the face of which demurral, the company pointed out that it’s rarely the cheapest copy place in town, and asserted that many mom-’n’-pop shops actually find themselves doing more business after Kinko’s moves in around the corner, especially if they offer such services as offset printing and linotronic output, as Kinko’s, for all intents and purposes, does not. The company likes to believe that its proliferation owes first to the great pride its co-workers (never “employees ”) take in keeping the customer beaming. One imagines that having been in the right place at exactly the right time -- that at which many companies realized the cost-ineffectiveness of maintaining their own copy centers -- might have had a little something to do with it too. And some more of the company’s recent success surely owes to its having redefined itself as Your Branch Office That Never Closes just as most of the 38 million Americans who’d come to work out of offices in their homes were being let go by downsizing corporations. They may have come at first for the free paper clips and correction fluid, but they came back for the computers, which Kinko’s began renting out by the hour in the mid-80s after satisfying itself that the Macintosh 512 wasn’t apt to intimidate people as MS-DOS did. Within two years of the first Macs’ appearance (in Austin, Ft. Collins, Minneapolis, New Haven, and Knoxville), 200 stores had them, and countless thousands of Americans traipsed in to output their resumes on Laserwriters. Within a decade, there were more than 10,000 Macs and PC’s in the 725 or so Kinko’s stores. A great many of them not state of the art. While Kinko’s has made it a practice to leave the bleeding edge of photocopy technology to the federal government, it’s had no such luxury with computers, and has learned the hard way -- from wholesale customer disgruntlement -- that it’s impossible to stay up-to-the-minute in the face of the standard two-year lease. Only in the latter half of 1994 did the company finally make 486’s (and Pentiums) widely available to IBM users. At the dawn of 1995, on the other hand, Mac users could use Power PC’s at the Kinko’s of their choice -- provided they chose one of a couple in Seattle. Undeterred by oversized faxing’s having pretty much laid an egg, Kinko’s remains committed to Technological Advancement in other areas. Video conferencing, which 120 stores have come to offer since its introduction at the end of 1993, has proved popular not only with scowling persons in suits, but also, on such occasions as Mothers Day and Christmas, with families. Self-service modems, a Kinko’s electronic bulletin board (BBS) that will enable customers to transmit their documents without fear of having to interact with a moonlighting abstract expressionist with a nose ring are in the works, and so too are miniphoto labs. Any day now, the new generation of digital photocopiers will begin to appear, using scanners and laser engines instead of light lens technology. Speaking of Seattle, as we were a moment ago, grunge isn’t exactly underrepresented among Kinko’s co–workers in big cities. If not because of its creative atmosphere and generous benefit package, then because its always-opennness can accommodate even the most bohemian biorhythms, the company attracts disproportionate numbers of artists, musicians, and other creative types. All co-workers, bohemian and buttoned down alike, are urged to work on the computers when customers ain’t, but overseeing a desktop publishing area isn’t necessarily the glamorous occupation some of the photocopier jockeys might imagine. In-deed, get in a couple of customers who don’t really know what they’re doing, but who do know that they’re being charged in one-minute increments and a couple of others are discovering that different output devices may well have a very different concep-tion of what red is, or green, and you have the makings of a very stressful day. On paper, at least one long time co-worker has noted, the company’s avowed policy of non-discrimination looks terrific, but the higher up you go, the whiter, the maler. And yet, there are ample signs that, as Paul Orfalea claims, Kinko’s is indeed genuinely committed to The Loftiest Ideals. On the cover of its video conferencing brochure, not only a white dude and an Asian scowl solemnly at the prospective customer, but a Wesley Snipes lookalike too. Nor can there be any mistaking that the hands on the cover of the Oversize Copies brochure are those of a person of African descent. ’They're an open-minded company,“ Mark Floegel of Greenpeace's Pulp and Paper Campaign, exulted in mid-1993 after Kinko’s agreed to switch from (carcinogenic) chlorine-bleached to oxygen-bleached white paper. “Kinko's has seen the light.” The company’s high-mindedness didn’t do it much good, though, when a coalition of publishers including Harper Row and William Morrow sued it at the end of the 80s for photocopying excerpts from copyrighted books without permission and binding them into anthologies for college students and others. A lot of the books are out of print, Kinko’s argued, and “fair use” (for education, in this case) precludes prosecution under the copyright laws. Copying for educational purposes alone, the publishers countered, doesn’t justify not having secured our permission to reprint. Pay the plaintiffs $1.9 million in damages and legal fees, said the judge, and change your evil ways. In the wake of which fiasco, the company seemed to become acutely conscious of the need for positive PR. In the spring of 1993, the 30 stores of Kinko’s of Ohio bought the state 3,000 seedlings, which the Department of Natural Resources had pronounced due recompense for all the copy paper it had used. Not to be outdone, Kinko’s of Arkansas gave the city of Fayetteville 819 grown trees -- a great many of which the city didn’t know quite what to do with. Come summer, Kinko’s of Salt Lake City reforested a nearby camping area that borer beetles had devastated. And one was forever encountering mentions of the Kinko’s two blocks from the Capitol in Washington, D.C. in the national newsmedia. When Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala wanted in the spring of 1994 to throw a book party for her newly published pal the deputy secretary of Education with no suggestion of impropriety, she made copies of the invitation not on the White House’s fax machine, but at Kinko’s, where she was observed waiting in line, just as you or I. During the health insurance furor of the summer, when lots of congresspersons took to brandishing charts in the manner of Ross Perot, it wasthat selfsame grandchild of the renegade hippies’ Isla Vista print shop that enlarged them to C-SPAN’s specifications. Chatting with a couple of the company’s Major Players, one notes that Kinko’s nearly 800 percent markup on double density diskettes, for instance, flies in the face of its avowed goal of Democratizing the Technology. Within 24 hours, the company’s founder and namesake himself has phoned to assure that he’ll look into the matter personally. (And he makes the call himself, with no secretary wondering rhetorically first if one will hold for Mr. Paul Orfalea, and then subjecting one to five minutes of the beautiful music of Christmas while the great man finishes his chat with Michael Ovitz.) While on the line, Kinko’s heretofore media-shy kingpin reveals himself to have matters of far greater moment than the price of diskettes on his mind. He observes with nearly palpable indignation that the Japanese copy pictures of new buildings, while in this country, we copy lawsuits. He’s convinced that we in the West think in our ears, the Japanese in their eyes, and its pains him big time. Why, oh why, do we remain in the thrall of bullshit words -- words, words, words, words! -- on a piece of paper when it takes three pages of them to equal what the Japanese can do with one of pictograms?” Behold the King of Copies seemingly yearning to have made fewer.