Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Picture perfect

Rule #1. Have a receipt. If you have a receipt, you begin in a decent bargaining position, because you have proof that at some point in time someone paid for a piece of merchandise. It might not be you, it might not be within 90 days, and there might be some irregularities, but in general, having a receipt is like starting a poker hand with a pair of aces.

Rule #2. Don't try to return photos you made using the Kodak PictureMaker machine. You scanned them. You cropped them. You made them look like something a blind baboon flinging poo on a wall could duplicate. Stupidity is not an excuse for a return. If it were, your parents would most likely be childless.

Rule #3. Don't try to return the aforementioned Kodak PictureMaker atrocities months after you allegedly paid for them. That's like buying a chicken, roasting it for Sunday dinner with some potatoes, carrots and a nice stuffing, then using the bones to make chicken soup - then trying to return the bones after the dog gnawed on it in the yard for a week. You've had those awful pictures for months. If you were truly "horrified" at them, you would have never paid for them.

Rule #4. Don't blame the entire incident on a nebulous "aunt" who picked up the pictures. Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder wouldn't have paid for those. Much less the $19 allegedly paid for those pictures.

Rule #5. No, I don't feel sorry for you that you needed to "send them off for a scholarship" and you "lost the pictures" until now and you had to "send off the originals." For 19 bucks you could go to a PhotoBooth at the mall if you need quick snaps. Or even the Wal-Mart Portrait Studio. Or get a friend with a digital camera. You get what you put into it. Consider it your first post-high-school lesson. Since obviously cause & effect never sunk in.

Rule #6. Pointing to the barcode on the envelope the photos came in and saying "This is the receipt, right here," is really not going to work. Are you sure this was for a scholarship and not for a parole application?

Rule #7. I know EXACTLY what you did. You needed an photo for something - and decided to scan in your tiny 2x3 photos from either your prom or graduation - and blow them up to 5x7 or 8x10 size. Really, you should know better. If you don't, ask. Bigger is not always better. You'll learn that one in college too!

Rule #8. You don't have a receipt, you don't even have anything that can be tracked to show your original order. Those envelopes come with every order. Who's to say you didn't order double prints of your vacation photos and use that envelope?

You also don't have anything that offers a shred of proof you ordered the pictures from this Wal-Mart. You are the one who produced that work. You had the chance to look at it before you paid for it. Please tell me - what does Wal-Mart owe you? Besides a good hard smack upside the head?

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

PLEASE tell me you didn't give them their money back!

What happened in this case? What did you do, and how did the customer respond?

Anonymous said...

I worked in Customer Service for 14 years. It got to the point that I just couldn't listen to peoples' tales of woe anymore without rolling my eyes - good thing I worked on the phones...

Tell me that some manager did NOT come along and give them their money back, pretty please...

Marie
:0)

Chris Silk said...

The resolution? They whined and moaned and complained and got bubkes. They didn't have a receipt or nothing. We couldn't even tell if the pictures were done at a Wal-Mart. Score one for me!

Anonymous said...

It's a shame you couldn't provide us with some scans.

joopiter said...

I say we start a collection to outfit bbcamerican with a spy cam. One of those tiny, little button-hole jobs that no one would notice, especially not Wal-Mart clientele. The only thing that would make this blog better is visuals. :)

Anonymous said...

Today's blog was like a movie trailer! Stop teasing and tell us the whole story!

By the way, LOVE your site and have been telling everyone how funny it is :)

And I sure do look at the people behind the counter with a new perspective now!

Thanks for the laughs!

peacemongermom said...

I used to work in the photo lab at a walmart in TexAss. It was hell. The crap that people would pull was amazing. And the behavior that they thought was acceptable - especially during Xmas - was appalling. /Shudder/

Once we had a woman come in and use up an entire roll of paper in the Kodak printer trying to print off a whole bunch of soft core porno pictures that she had made professionally. We obviously couldn't sell them to her because (a) they were nude and (b) they were professional.

She spent the day playing with the Kodak machine (which I personally dreamt daily of blowing up with dynomite) and covering the screen so no one could see her Dainty Rosebud and then the fit she threw when we couldn't sell her the pix!!!

Lordy. Those were the days.