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This was going to be a cheerful rant about a bunch of absurdities. I'll try to incorporate that, but apparently it's still ongoing, so I'm a bit less cheerful. I'm going to contact their customer service also, but sheesh.
Disclaimer: I do not know if this is all jcpportraits or just really bad luck with the one at Washington Square, Oregon, on one occasion, or somethng in the middle. I have a single data point. It's annoyingly clear data, but it's still just one data point.
We took Drew in to get his photograph taken because they do coupons for free baby portraits and I wanted to see if the results (on a real baby, not putting up the very best ones they could get consent forms for for advertising purposes) were good. I didn't expect them to be as good as Corrie's work, nor to convert me to using just them. If nothing else, a ten-minute session and a two-hour session are entirely different beasts.
Um. At no point was his safety threatened, but I was not comfortable with the photography session. They put him in a holder thingy that, to get a good photo, needed him to lift/control his head. He's THREE MONTHS OLD. I'd TOLD them he was THREE MONTHS OLD. Most three-month-old babies cannot, according to all the reading I've done, do what they were asking. Drew can...but he was tired, and he kept giving up on it. Me, I'm wondering wtf they do with newborns if they can't put together a setup that doesn't require head lift and control. I didn't quite take my baby back, because it was safe, but I wanted to. If he hadn't been staying fairly together (FAIRLY together) for being asked to lift and pose while he was tired and not up to it, I would have; as it was, he was dealing and I knew it was a short session.
The pictures were few, and not that great, owing in part to the fact that his head kept listing to the side. Once that was cute; the rest of them just looked pretty dumb.
Then you wait and wait for your photos (seriously, what happened to ease of printing photos? On-site photo labs? Come on...). Ours were to be ready for pick up today (a free 8x10, a cheap sheet of 5x7's because that was on the coupon, and one special that they talked us into because it was too cute). I stopped on my way home, and after the one woman who was there finished dealing with the people ahead of me who were picking out photos, she opened the drawer for mine and asked whether we'd modified our order, because there were two envelopes there.
No, we hadn't. So off to the computer we (and the two envelopes) go. She searches for me by name and asks if I'm the one in Beaverton. No, I say, I live in Wilsonville. There's no Wilsonville resident on the list. I stare a moment longer, then look at other columns (she is, btw, letting me see a list of customers with my last name, including address and phone number; I wonder if that's quite right, depending on other people's memories, but). "That IS my phone number, though," I note. On the...BEAVERTON address. Tied to a name (mine) typed all in lower case.
She opens the record. It's my name, my zip code, my phone number, and someone else's street address and city of residence. There are two portrait sessions in there. One is Drew's, and we confirm which package is mine. It even has the right things in it for a wonder. The other is some woman and kid I've never me. But the woman who works there recognizes her - the woman was in earlier to get her portraits but no one could find them and she wasn't in the computer. So this is a good thing for her, 'cause now they can call her back and she'll get her portraits.
The record is amended to have all my data on it. She'll get her own record. BUT...her session? Permanently tied to my record. The woman tells me they can't move sessions between records. Even erroneously-placed ones. She has no idea how it happened. (I have a guess, and it involves someone not saving an existing record before starting on my data, and just putting it in over top. Sheesh.)
They also try to sucker me into a few more prints. Cunningly, these cute little things are already printed; I only have to pay for them. They ARE cute, but no thanks. Presumably those three 8x10 sheets of premium paper go in the trash after being taken out of my packet. Happy Earth Day.
Then I come home. And we have a frame, which we bought there, which will fit the cute special photo we were talked into. It was 75% off is my (and Scott's, he says) memory of what we were told that day, only according to the receipt we only got 50% off. Irrelevant, because it DOESN'T FIT THE PHOTO. The photo is larger (not much larger, but larger) in both length and width than the sample image slip that goes in the frame, and since that fits exactly, the photo doesn't.
So. Tomorrow I will try to stop by and sort this out. I am not amused. I am not pleased. I am not impressed. And I want my money back for the frame. Some other consideration for all the hassle and stupidity would be nice, but frankly, I'm not sure what they can do other than a retroactive discount on what I did buy, because I can't imagine why I'd want to use their studio again....
Disclaimer: I do not know if this is all jcpportraits or just really bad luck with the one at Washington Square, Oregon, on one occasion, or somethng in the middle. I have a single data point. It's annoyingly clear data, but it's still just one data point.
We took Drew in to get his photograph taken because they do coupons for free baby portraits and I wanted to see if the results (on a real baby, not putting up the very best ones they could get consent forms for for advertising purposes) were good. I didn't expect them to be as good as Corrie's work, nor to convert me to using just them. If nothing else, a ten-minute session and a two-hour session are entirely different beasts.
Um. At no point was his safety threatened, but I was not comfortable with the photography session. They put him in a holder thingy that, to get a good photo, needed him to lift/control his head. He's THREE MONTHS OLD. I'd TOLD them he was THREE MONTHS OLD. Most three-month-old babies cannot, according to all the reading I've done, do what they were asking. Drew can...but he was tired, and he kept giving up on it. Me, I'm wondering wtf they do with newborns if they can't put together a setup that doesn't require head lift and control. I didn't quite take my baby back, because it was safe, but I wanted to. If he hadn't been staying fairly together (FAIRLY together) for being asked to lift and pose while he was tired and not up to it, I would have; as it was, he was dealing and I knew it was a short session.
The pictures were few, and not that great, owing in part to the fact that his head kept listing to the side. Once that was cute; the rest of them just looked pretty dumb.
Then you wait and wait for your photos (seriously, what happened to ease of printing photos? On-site photo labs? Come on...). Ours were to be ready for pick up today (a free 8x10, a cheap sheet of 5x7's because that was on the coupon, and one special that they talked us into because it was too cute). I stopped on my way home, and after the one woman who was there finished dealing with the people ahead of me who were picking out photos, she opened the drawer for mine and asked whether we'd modified our order, because there were two envelopes there.
No, we hadn't. So off to the computer we (and the two envelopes) go. She searches for me by name and asks if I'm the one in Beaverton. No, I say, I live in Wilsonville. There's no Wilsonville resident on the list. I stare a moment longer, then look at other columns (she is, btw, letting me see a list of customers with my last name, including address and phone number; I wonder if that's quite right, depending on other people's memories, but). "That IS my phone number, though," I note. On the...BEAVERTON address. Tied to a name (mine) typed all in lower case.
She opens the record. It's my name, my zip code, my phone number, and someone else's street address and city of residence. There are two portrait sessions in there. One is Drew's, and we confirm which package is mine. It even has the right things in it for a wonder. The other is some woman and kid I've never me. But the woman who works there recognizes her - the woman was in earlier to get her portraits but no one could find them and she wasn't in the computer. So this is a good thing for her, 'cause now they can call her back and she'll get her portraits.
The record is amended to have all my data on it. She'll get her own record. BUT...her session? Permanently tied to my record. The woman tells me they can't move sessions between records. Even erroneously-placed ones. She has no idea how it happened. (I have a guess, and it involves someone not saving an existing record before starting on my data, and just putting it in over top. Sheesh.)
They also try to sucker me into a few more prints. Cunningly, these cute little things are already printed; I only have to pay for them. They ARE cute, but no thanks. Presumably those three 8x10 sheets of premium paper go in the trash after being taken out of my packet. Happy Earth Day.
Then I come home. And we have a frame, which we bought there, which will fit the cute special photo we were talked into. It was 75% off is my (and Scott's, he says) memory of what we were told that day, only according to the receipt we only got 50% off. Irrelevant, because it DOESN'T FIT THE PHOTO. The photo is larger (not much larger, but larger) in both length and width than the sample image slip that goes in the frame, and since that fits exactly, the photo doesn't.
So. Tomorrow I will try to stop by and sort this out. I am not amused. I am not pleased. I am not impressed. And I want my money back for the frame. Some other consideration for all the hassle and stupidity would be nice, but frankly, I'm not sure what they can do other than a retroactive discount on what I did buy, because I can't imagine why I'd want to use their studio again....
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We've had decent luck with the local JC Penney photographers, but we also didn't start going until Cordelia was one.
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I haven't used Penney's since I was little - and obviously don't know about the packages / coordination / etc part of that. Oddly enough, I've had wonderful success with, of all places, Wal-Mart Portraits. Those are the only professional portraits I have of the boys, excluding school pix.
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