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Well, those of you that know me I tend to go overboard with photo taking. Afterall, photos are probably the best souvenir you are ever going to have of your once in a life time travel adventure.
Plus, if you are like me, a third of the photos turn out dodge so you need more than what you actually need...
Anyway, for a few weeks when I returned to the home country, I visited a few photo shops - Teds, Rabbit, Kodak and Amcal (ok, i know the latter is not a photo shop and they send it off to to kodak). After getting a few quotes, for 96 rolls of film (for jules and I) no one was going to give me a price better than the VIP price (in other words, back of the shop a docket price). Only Kodak Chadstone offered a 10% discount on top of the VIP price, which, was $2 a roll more expensive anyway.
oh, I chose not to get them developed at Kmart, even though it is heaps cheaper, because Kamrt Burwood has a tendency to lose rolls of film and colours can come out a bit funny...
Anyway, to cut the long story short, I chose to get our photos developed at Kodak Chadstone - the guy displayed the most customer service and said he will do white borders and matte finish at no extra cost (originally $2 extra each per roll). So I though Kodak would be the best way to go. So, I was paying extra for Kodak trained professionally staff to do a good job with our photos.
What happened?
I got a phone call from the friendly Kodak dude, saying that "oh, we had a problem with matte paper, so we had to develop them on gloss and the casual that came in last night *forgot* to put white borders on some of your photos ".
Ok then, why go ahead processing out photos on gloss without consuting the customer about the situation and asking them whether they wanted to wait until the next delivery of matte paper? He knew I was in no hurry with the photos. And why not re process the photos with the white border rather than leave them without white border? Before I picked them up, I was under the impression I would have a miss mathce dbunch of photos, some with borders and some without borders which would totally look dumb in my photo albums.
So, I picked up the photos, found out "some of your photos do not have white borders" turned out to be all of mine not have white borders at all, not half half like I was led to believe.
While jules and I were looking through our photos we found smugdes on some, some were missing and on a handful there was a thickish black line on the edge, like the person had not cut the photo correctly or negative.
Excuse me if i am wrong, but are we not paying double the price because the kodak staff look at each photo to make sure they are correct? So I was informed anyway.
Oh, must I add that one packet of mine had white borders and matte paper so what was the deal with matte paper being damaged? Was that just an excuse to cover up that fact that they forgot and it would be costly for Kodak to re do all our photos?
Anyway, there is more.
Julie, Em and I sat down one night and painstankigly selected which photos from all of our piles we wanted reprints. This continued with the lengthy process to fill out the negative slips oursleves to save kodak staff's time.
We had to make sure that the ones jules wanted we wrote needed a white border.
The outcome:
- we got mulitple copies of the one photo (eg 15 copies of 1 particular photo) not even asked for
- white borders were missing off some when stated we wanted white borders
- extra copies of photos that we asked for, ie, we got 4 copies instad of 2
- white borders on a set of reprints that did not have white borders requested on the envelope reprint folder at all
- occurrence of thick black line on edge of photos
- overcharged for about 50 photos!
So, jules and I went in the next night, spoke to some girl about our concerns all she could say was "I don't usually work in this store, they do things differently here, I do not know how to process a refund you will have to come back"
We have spent $1500 on film and photo precessing between three of us and she told us to come back and could not even solve the problem? She didn't even try to attempt to solve the situation, didn't even say that she would take down our name and number and get the manager to call us back.
So, another girl came over and explained that "the machine sometimes does not role the negative on properly that is why there are black edges, and this negative has been cut crooked, it just depend on who you get developing your photos"
That to me, is no excuse, each kodak staff member should be taking the same care with every photo as if it was their own. They are supposed to be the professionals, better than kmart and Big W. If I wanted those kind of errors, I would have paid half the price, and got my photos developed at kmart.
Anyway, she was able to give us the refund, my digital prints were not ready as they should have been and they did not even inform me.
As consequence of their bad service, I have left my 500 digial prints at Kodak, I plan never to collect them. I do not want sub standard photos so they can keep them. I don't answer my mobile when they call, presumably telling me to pick them up they are ready - funny that, they never called me to say that "don't come in tonight, your photos are not ready".
So now, I still had to get my digital prints developed so I decided to do my own "today tonight" test. I dropped off the same digital photo (a 640x480 resolution, and a 1200x1600 resoultion) to Kodak Brandon Park, which is Camera House and Kmart Brandon Park.
Kodak Brandon Park (who by the way prints on fuji film) 640x480 print turned out fuzzy, which, well, i expected as such as now i realise that the 640x480 does not print a 6x4inch photo but would you believe that KMART Brandon Park's photo of the same 640x480 image was far clearer? No difference between 1600x1200 photo as you would expect.
So, there you go.
Paying double the price to get your photos developed by so called professionals does not mean better quality prints.
Go to Kmart. Stuff Kodak.
I've written a letter of complaint, will ask for compensation, apparently that is their policy, follow entry up to what Kodak offer to do will come soon. Have also posted a complaint on notgoodenough.org website....
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