And the curtain I’m referring to is this one:
We recently had some professional pictures taken of Evie. I personally think that the pictures we take at home are as good (or better since we can take so many and pick the best) but Sara had always regretted not getting any when Evie was born. So I set up an appointment and got her a gift certificate for mother’s day. It was more difficult than I expected! I wanted to go to a real studio but it was tough to find one in a convenient location that wasn’t crappy and wasn’t open weird hours only. That narrowed it down quite a bit. Then I found out that a lot of studios only do graduation pictures, or at least when they’re doing graduation pictures they aren’t open for regular business. So I finally settled on JC Penney.
Now let me start out by saying that the photographer was actually pretty good. The setup was pretty good and they even had some props and stuff that were pretty good. However, at the end of the day, JC Penney rips you off with pictures.
The problem for them is that in the old days nobody knew exactly how pictures worked, so they could pretend like it was a very complicated and difficult process that they needed to charge you a lot of money for. However, we all have digital cameras now. The secret is out! The man in the iron mask is revealed, and it is trivially easy. But I guess they (like a lot of businesses I suppose) want to pretend it is still the good ole days and everything remains unchanged.
So we took the pictures and waited around for about 15 minutes and then they brought the pictures up on a monitor for us to see. They had all of the poses plus someone had spent the 15 minutes making a couple of generic photoshop edits; black and white, sepia, a couple of cheap looking borders and captions. Now we knew the pictures would be ridiculously overpriced, that was part of the game. But right off the bat they want to charge you almost double for anything with a border or anything like that. But the curtain is gone! I know for a fact that after the picture is taken they just open some computer program and type in a caption and voila! By the time we are looking at it, all the work is done except for the printing. There is no way that should cost anything extra, much less $30! I could do better in less time at home. Furthermore, I expected them to print our selections on the spot. Instead they told us they would be ready in about 2 weeks. There is absolutely no reason for that. They are trying to pretend they need a fancy technician in a fancy darkroom somewhere or something, but I know they are just coming off a photo-printer and could be ready in under a minute.
Now all of that was annoying, but no big deal. What finally put me over the edge is when I went to pick them up. When I got there the salesperson pulled out a couple of extra sheets with some cute poses. Someone had taken another 15 minutes or so and arranged a few more shots, had even performed a ::gasp:: crop on one of the pictures. I thought to myself, “Wow, that’s nice, they’re including a couple of extras!” In retrospect, of course that was stupidly naive, but I know that it cost them pennies (no pun intended) to create and print those sheets and I thought, “Well, it’s kind of smart. We’re happy because we got a couple of free ones and maybe even someone sees them and likes them and we go back and order a few more or something.” But of course that’s not what happened, I was informed that the “lab” printed up a few extra which I could purchase for an additional $20 a sheet. When I said no thanks, we’re good (and it was hard even at those prices because they were really cute) the pictures WENT IN THE TRASH.
I repeat, pictures of my adorable daughter, really cute ones with a wash cloth on her head got thrown IN THE TRASH right in front of my face. Well, to be fair it wasn’t in front of my face, I saw it out of the corner of my eye as I was turning away. So they already made them and had them printed and everything, any expense on their part was already paid, and they chose to throw them away rather than give them for me. And they were going to charge me $20 for something they valued so little that they just trashed.
BOOOOOOOOO to you JC Penney! For shame!
Shane Halbach 
Two little things I forgot to mention.
1) They charged us $4 for the ability to have access to the website to be able to order more pictures if we wanted. They charged us for the ability to give them more money! Also, they told us we could download the pictures from the website, even though we didn’t believe them. And of course you can’t, you can download tiny 2 inch low resolution thumb nails.
2) You can order a CD containing all of the images for the low price of $100!! I understand that once you have the pictures on CD you are not going to order any more from them (as I said, the man behind the curtain is revealed), so I would be willing to pay some outrageous price to them. Maybe even as much as $30! $100 might as well be a million dollars.
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Even though we don’t have kids, I can still completely relate to this. You know we like to cruise, and we always have the stupid photos taken on formal nights and then never end up buying them, because they’re so expensive. And then they go in the trash. I’ve even been on a ship where they had a bin so that you could trash your own photos if you didn’t want them! Of course, I assume that feature is for your own benefit so you don’t suffer the humiliation of people like us who go through and laugh at other people’s really-bad photos (we’re always criticizing the junky ship’s photographers who have a knack for horrible angles, robotic poses, and snapping people when they’re making unfortunate expressions).
However, despite the lack of photographic talent, we do occasionally get a photo that we really like and are sad to see go in the trash when we balk at coughing up the $25 for a single print. On our last Royal Caribbean cruise, we were killing time one afternoon and went and had “lifestyle” portraits taken. “Lifestyle” means “not formal night” or “an all-white background and no shoes.” We were in gym clothes and no make-up, and we were just having fun (and wasting the ship’s unending supply of photo paper). A few of the photos came out fantastic! Not surprisingly, they looked just like us! We were happy and natural and just normal! But again, we don’t need an 8×10 photo of ourselves. And neither do our parents (I think 8×10 is just too big for random photo usage).
So we asked if we could get two smaller prints instead (one for each parental pair). I swear this is the actual conversation (except that the guy’s name probably wasn’t Bob):
Them: Sure! Oh, but you have to buy the original 8×10 print before we can make additional copies.
Us: We don’t want an 8×10.
Them: Sorry, you have to buy the one we printed before we’ll make more.
Us: Well, Can you just sell us the digital file?
Them: It’s $75.
Us: $75? For just the one image?
Them: Yes.
Us: We’ll think about it.
Believe it or not, after a day of consideration, we actually decided to cough up the $75 for ONE picture!
Us: We want the digital file for this image.
Them (a different “them” today): Well, you see… it’s $75!!!
Us: We know.
Them: Uh, hold on…. Bob, they want to buy the digital file.
Bob: It’s $75.
Us: We KNOW!
Them: Okay, so that’s one digital file and one 8×10, so that’s $100.
Us: We don’t want the 8×10.
Them: Well, you have to buy the original along with the digital file.
Us: WTF?! You’re kidding, right?
Them: No.
Us: Well we DON’T WANT the 8×10, so forget it, I guess.
We’d spent all that time convincing ourselves that $75 was sort of reasonable, and we probably would have convinced ourselves that $100 was okay, since it would be our file forever and ever, but the principle of the last $25 for the stupid 8×10 just made us too mad! After all, they’re going to THROW IT AWAY! Why on earth would we have to buy it to get the digital copy? Grrr…. I should really right them a letter because the stupidity of the situation astounds me. The least they can do is explain why they wanted us to pay $25 to throw away their trash for them. Heck, we should have bought it and then billed the company $25 for “Trash Removal Services.”
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