JCP Portraits reviews

It's more of a sales job than photography, except there is NO commission other than a crappy $4 for selling a ridiculous overpriced media bundle that no one buys. Insulting minimum wage pay even for a college grad with photography experience. Way too much pressure to swindle customers just to increase sales- with absolutely no reward or incentive for the employee. It's actually horrendous how much they charge for pictures while paying their employees the bottom of the barrel scraps. You might as well work for JC Penney as a cashier and do a fraction of the work for $8 an hour.

Buckle up. OFF-SEASON HOURS: Your hours will NOT be good in the off-season unless you're a manager because they are required to be there pretty much every day. They're definitely required to be available at all times the way my manager is always on a Teams call with people for mundane topics. The associate role is part-time, so you very much will be doing part-time hours. I got four per week. Four hours. My check was about $105 every two weeks. PEAK HOURS: You do not have a choice to work if your studio is understaffed, which it most likely will be because the retention rate is garbage due to the company not offering any reasons to stay. You will come in if you're sick. You might have all of your fellow associates also be sick and the most they have to do is wear a mask if they're returning from a COVID isolation period. They WILL NOT close your books--or even shorten your studios hours/do every 45 minutes instead of every 15 for appointments--if you're all sick. If you somehow make it to over-time in the middle of a day, your manager gets an email and they'll tell you to clock off so they don't have to pay it, even if the studio is getting smashed with customers. Great pay during the season if you're willing to work yourself into an early death! MANAGEMENT: This company cannot keep managers to save their lives. They offer a base pay of $21/hr for managers. Managers keep studios afloat. NOBODY works harder than managers who are good at their job at this place. No district manager, tech person, CFO, or CEO works as hard as those people do. They have to abide by so many arbitrary rules and regulations, and yet barely have any power themselves. The district managers do nothing. They're not even trained to help out in studios, which is what they should do. If your only job is to send a message to a group chat asking other managers (who can potentially be running two studios at once) if they can spare an employee to help a studio with no manager and one employee, then are you really necessary? I feel like their job can be accomplished with a designated group chat of managers. I digress. The company itself micromanages until its poorly powdered wig falls off. They track our phone calls, cross-reference with our books, force managers to grade photography while they aren't allowed to do anything during peak season in order to "train" the newbies, change the grading/shooting guidelines for every Easter and winter holiday season, and police the hours their "lowly" associates can get. PAY: Starting wage across the board for associates is $15/hr. You think that'd be good, but it's abysmal for the amount of work you're doing. They used to have dedicated desk, sales, and photography people. Now, you're expected to do everything. It's fine to ask your employees to be able to hold down those areas if need be, but doing all three in the same day, and usually doing desk and sales at the same time is overwhelming. I'm not even from a big studio either. People from big studios WILL be going between the studio, sales computers, and check-in desk/phone areas hundreds of times per day. $15/hr is not nearly enough for doing the work of 3.5 people. They literally will decline managers' proposed hire numbers all the time because they want to hire the bare minimum amount of people. This company is so worried about minimizing "overpaying" employees. You do get a sales incentive for selling over $200, $300, and $500, but I have NEVER had a sale over $500 during my time here. They used to base it off of bundles, but they decided we were making too much money off that system and changed it to the total amount because they give out too many coupons to customers for extremely discounted digital albums and bundles. Also, don't even think about asking for a raise unless you're basically a lifer. Someone who had worked here for NINE years only got a SEVENTY CENT raise. You also only get thirty-three cents on the mile if you travel to help another studio. Just gas money. Nothing else. Even when they're practically begging you. CULTURE: There is no culture. Lifetouch used to have pizza parties, employee appreciation, etc. Shutterfly does nothing for its employees except give out friends and family discount codes that are basically the same as ones you can find on their websites that are just them trying to get more customers through their own employees. Anything fun that they do is basically for non-studio people, a.k.a. 9-5 desk workers. There's never a dull day in a studio during peak though, so of course we don't need anything fun to take our mind off having appointments scheduled every fifteen minutes from 9 until 8! They send out pandering emails whenever a widely reported incident happens. That's the culture. Emails from the CEO-or whoever--talking about her dog or her family, trying to relate to us when we just want to be emailed about a studio associate/manager raise. WELLBEING: Breaks do not happen during peak season weekends. Sometimes weekdays as well, but I'm sure it's all season for larger studios. Honestly, I would sue about this. Many times my coworkers and I do not get to take breaks because there is no time specifically allocated for them and we're just supposed to "figure it out" with 40 appointments scheduled that day with one camera room. When Lifetouch owned the studios, they had break times taken out of the schedule--not with Shutterfly. When are we supposed to eat? Peacefully relieve ourselves? Take a break from smiling all the time because that's what they want? They do not care. They ALSO do not care if you're sick, as I've mentioned before. What's the point of having sick hours if you can't even use them when need be? ORGANIZATION: Any important changes are told to managers who are expected to tell associates. What happens when managers don't know how to communicate? You have a bunch of employees who don't know they're doing things "wrong." We're also not trained on how to fix camera issues if they happen, so we have to get in a queue of other photographers who don't know how to assess, diagnose, and find a solution to simple problems. The people on the help line ALSO are not trained. They read from a manual with a flow chart of issues, I suppose. There have been multiple times when our camera had the same issue of not taking the picture after multiple clicks and their solution EVERY time was to send a new camera instead of maybe asking us to examine the sensor system, or sending in a professional to diagnose the problem. With that, the cameras just get passed around between studios. So, you're saying the problem will be fixed in another studio simply by just sending the camera over and letting them assume it's a new one? I don't really know how that works, but I do know that no one knows what's going on with the technology. Wouldn't it be so helpful if you hired knowledgeable people to assist studios with that instead of call center-type people? This is not a dig at those people either. Love you all for putting up with us. This doesn't necessarily pertain to organization, but why does this company hire "traveling" photographers and pay them more to travel, but then let them decline to travel EVER? They're DAs and one of ours just stays at their one studio. It's in the job description to travel and you're just letting them not do their job, even when it's IMPERATIVE that studios have proper amounts of help for the season? The DM can't even visit studios when they say they will for check-ups. CUSTOMER INTERACTION: When you say you want a $140 average overall sale, you mean WITH the coupons that make the most popular item (the digital album) $60? You mean WITH a $50 gift card you gave out during the holiday season? You mean WITH a Groupon that people get mad about because they don't read the fine print about shipping? That is not attainable at some studios. Some studios are in places with smaller populations with less wealth around. The economy is in shambles and you want us to push an average of $140 on a working Millennial family of three just trying to document the first weeks/months of their child's life? JCP Portraits isn't even upfront about the cost of sessions. I'd say 60% of the phone calls I get are about prices because they're not easily accessible on Google or the main page of the website. People are not willing to look for prices as much as you think they are. They're also not willing to read the fine print on deals, so why should we be offering them a free 8x10 and membership and ruin our personal AOV to compensate them for not having the brain cells to assume a luxury product is going to cost more than $20? It also impacts studios if the people SHIPPING the product mess up. They removed a cardboard insert in the print packages--I assume to cut corners and save money--and they're ending up with WAY more remakes than before. Apparently that's fine though, since it's not THEM, it's the STUDIOS who are messing them up in shipping, even though we don't handle orders physically at all. We also have to do cold calls to bring people in during the off-season, which is not at all what I signed up for. I was never told I'd have to do that. I signed up for sales and photography, not call center representative duties. The customers don't like it either. If someone is thinking about a session, they'll come in whenever it works for them. The most I was semi-comfortable with was calling people to remind them about their memberships ending soon because it's something they paid for, so I might as well let them get their money's worth. Lastly, we cannot defend ourselves or make any case if we notice customers taking advantage of a Groupon/reshoot/low-res image preview situation. Some people will come in, use their membership to not pay session fees, and just use the low resolution pictures they get for free in the post-appointment email. Customers also get reshoots if they ask, even if it's in the middle of a busy day for some reason. Not always, but if they're angry enough they for sure will. Why should we be giving into entitled people who end up realizing they just hate themselves and not the photos? I'm not saying this is always the case, but some people should be blacklisted from the studio, if I'm being honest. I also personally think Groupons shouldn't be available if they're going to stress our AOV so much. Groupons are usually a 0 for sales because they're most likely families who can't afford the session fees and full digital album, or young people who are just trying to have some fun! I don't think those people should be turned away, I just think Groupons shouldn't count negatively toward the AOV, so watch out for that if you're thinking of joining the "team." Don't punish the customers trying to make memories, and don't punish us for not forcing another sale down their throats. Never EVER have I been in such a position where I feel the most disrespected by an entity that I don't even have direct communications with. Whoever makes these decisions needs to experience one Saturday during peak season at a large volume studio and look us in the eyes to tell us we only deserve $15 an hour. I am staying until the end of the season because I respect my coworkers and do not wish them any harm by leaving and therefore causing dangerous amounts of unnecessary stress to be brought upon them by the suffocating clutches of this predatory business. Oh, and they paid Kris Jenner's rate to do ads for Shutterfly, but can't pay overtime for us. Toodles!