Most of the big commercial photo printers use very high quality inkjet or die-sublimation printers these days. Send your holiday snaps off in the post, or online, and that's where they'll end up. I strongly suspect that throwing away is a feature of these as opposed to cleaning.
At the very low end it's practically a free printer with every year's worth of ink. My printer isn't far off the bottom of the price range. I think I paid about £65 (100 CAD) for it, but a full set of inks from Canon is around £76 (for the large size). The printer gets quite a lot of use and I change the cartridges about 4 times a year, more for the black cartridges (it has 2) so if I was daft enough to stick with Canon ink I'd be spending maybe £350/year on ink. Which is why companies like HP have free starter subscriptions to their ink supply service. I'll be interested to see how the new "tank" models work out long term and how prone to clogging the print heads are.
So yeah, if the heads clog and I can't clean them, that's money in the bank for Canon/Epson/HP/Brother or whoever.