# The Picture People Implode.



## Bob Hubbard (Apr 11, 2007)

Copied these from my blogs. Interested on comments and thoughts.
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[FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]2 weeks ago, The Picture People, a national mall photo chain swept through WNY and shut down all 3 studios.  Within 1 week, their NY presence dropped from 17 studios, to 5. The count is now down to 4 and I suspect it to level out at 2 when this blood bath finally ends.[/FONT]

 [FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]The company is pretty much refusing to comment whenever anyone contacts them. The studios in WNY are pretty much intact. Company goons smashed the cameras and computers and boxed up the lights and hard drives, but other than that, you would think the staffs have just stepped out for a break.[/FONT]

 [FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]This massacre came out of the blue and surprised alot of people. The corporate mouthpieces had been telling the local studios that they were in line for a spring upgrade to digital. That new training and new gear was coming soon. The date though, kept being pushed back.[/FONT]

 [FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]The sad end result was a lot of good people got hurt and are still hurting right now.[/FONT]

 [FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]The disposition of the studios and their contents are currently tied up in legal limbo as the lawyers for the malls and Picture People do the legal-tango. Customers are left in the lurch as photos are now non-deliverable, who knows where their photos and negatives are and are stuck with now useless club memberships. Picture People's reply to repeated inquiries?[/FONT]

 [FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]No Comment[/FONT]

 [FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]If you are reading this and worked for Picture People in WNY, please drop me a line.  If you worked at the McKinley Mall store, please, please give me a call, or message me.[/FONT]

 [FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]And if you are a customer of Picture People, please do not blame the folks at the mall store. They honestly didn't know the axe was coming.  Please aim your ire at Picture People the company. They need to answer to you.

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[/FONT]From 317 stores the beginning of March, the current total is 180. It looks like they are closing the majority of their film locations as it doesn't appear existing digital studios are closing. Employees and customers at some locations were told that their location would not be closed, only to have the axe fall a few days later. Again, the comments from corporate are almost always "no comment".

Good luck on getting through to them. Wait time on the customer support number exceeds an hour (I gave up the 3 times I tried calling), and emails are not being replied to.


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## tellner (Apr 11, 2007)

Smashed the cameras and computers? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Those things are worth real money. Why the hell didn't they call in the auctioneers and liquidators? As for the photos, if the customers had already paid for them they are their property. If they hadn't, any attempt to sell or consign them to a third party would be an unauthorized no-model-release use of the person's image.


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## Brian R. VanCise (Apr 11, 2007)

Wow!


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## Bob Hubbard (Apr 11, 2007)

The comps were smashed to render them inoperable, though the HD's were remove and most likely boxed and shipped out as they contained the sales/customer data and proprietary software. No real loss on the pcs though, early model pentiums in most cases I believe.

The cameras....thats a different story.  Location I worked at briefly used Mamiya RX67's, as decked out about $3k each. 3 cameras per location.  Cameras were reported smashed at all 3 locations in WNY.  So, thats about $30k in gear there alone.

Photos are copyrighted to PP, though without releases their use is limited. Customers at one Syracuse location were told that their negatives and photos would be available at the other Syracuse location....which closed a few days later. 

Some areas are reporting the stores shut down and emptied out. The 3 WNY locations as of yesterday are still intact (less cameras and lights and POS systems). No idea if the customers negatives were sent anywhere, though at least 1 location still had a quantity of them on the film printer in the process of being printed when things shut down.

A bigger loss though, are those film printers. About $500,000 each, many now ruined beyond repair as weeks of no maintainance has caused the chemicals in them to, ah, spoil. This isn't a good thing for them.


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## Xue Sheng (Apr 11, 2007)

Back when I worked at a Sears Catalog store (Yup they use to have a big thick catalog) whenever something was ordered and not picked up it was taken to a dumpster out back that required a key to get in. Unlock the dumpster, throw the stuff in and relock the dumpster and then a truck would come by pick it up leave a new one and off to the landfill they would go. Or at least off to the guys the worked at the landfill. 

I had to put brand-new work bench tops, Tecumseh engines, entire mowers, etc in it. And they would NOT let any of their employees take any of it.


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## Flatlander (Apr 12, 2007)

This just doesn't make any sense to me.  I can understand that closing locations rather than upgrade equipment may have been a viable cost saving measure.  In search of profits, sometimes these things need to be done.  However, the destruction of valuable equipment seems to kind of offset the value, or at least a portion thereof, that they were attempting to create.  It just seems very illogical.


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## bluemtn (Apr 12, 2007)

Xue Sheng said:


> I had to put brand-new work bench tops, Tecumseh engines, entire mowers, etc in it. And they would NOT let any of their employees take any of it.


 
It's what a lot of companies like that call, "in- store theft"-  even if you are throwing it away...

Anyways...

There's a PP place not too far from where I live.  I wonder if it's closing down, or if it's just New York?


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## jks9199 (Apr 12, 2007)

tkdgirl said:


> It's what a lot of companies like that call, "in- store theft"-  even if you are throwing it away...
> 
> Anyways...
> 
> There's a PP place not too far from where I live.  I wonder if it's closing down, or if it's just New York?


No -- that's not "in-store theft" or internal loss.

Those items are being destroyed for a variety of reasons; often part is returned, or missing, and it's actually cheaper and more practical for them to simply destroy the stuff rather than return it to a supplier.  For example, paperback books that aren't sold have their covers ripped off, and the book is destroyed; it's not cost effective to send it back to the publisher.

In this case... I haven't got a clue why the Picture People would decide to destroy very valuable equipment as they apparently go out of business...  I almost suspect that there was a very nasty business break up or buy out.  That -- or the stuff was depreciated deeply enough that it wasn't worth moving/selling.  I'd think in a bankruptcy case, the stuff would have been sold off, for example.


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## Bob Hubbard (Apr 12, 2007)

The cameras at least at the one location were several years old, and most likely fully depreciated. That said, there were several employees who would have jumped at the chance to own one.

The PP in Charleston, WV is a film studio.  I would suspect it to be on the close list, though don't expect anyone at the store to know.  If they suspect and have asked, they will have been told no. That was what happened to several NY locations.


It's a nation-wide downsizing.
Ohio had 18, now 3
NY had 17, now 4
PA had 22, now 16 and falling. (The Erie PA store closed in the last 48 hrs)
RI had 1, now has none.
MA had 8, now 4.
And so it continues.

In other news, Walmart will reportedly be closing 500 of it's studios, citing poor performance and low income. This though, doesn't surprise me....as how profitable can you really be offering 35 prints for a buck?


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