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!