The most important fact from ANALOG to DIGITAL is not the technical change; It is the change of consumer habits and there new demands! It is not true that we have today less outputs of pictures, we have today much more possibilities to print out at many new and different locations. While in the past picture outputs where printed most on silver halide, there are today hardly borders on which media we can produce pictures. This development has lead to a decrease of turnover in wholesale labs and of course has touched also very strong Minilabs!
Kurt H Freund, "The Exploration of Dry-Micro/Minilabs" in Proc. Int'l Symp.on Technologies for Digital Photo Fulfillment, 2009, pp 40 - 40, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4672.2009.2.0.40