I am a manager at a Portrait Studio in Walmart. The longer I stay with the company (CPI CORP) the more and more I see the crap they try to pull over on us as "good things" and "better for us". Yeah, like the new bonus plan where they HOUND you to book appointments and get customers in but then they won't let you put 2 people on to cover all those appointments AND to do passport photos AND to do delivery's (which ISN'T just a case of handing the portraits to the customer. Nooo, you have to spend another precious 5 minutes of your non-existant time to try to con them into buying MORE portraits that are already printed and people feel horrible having portraits of their babies and loved ones ripped up so they get suckered into buying them.) so you are so overwhelmed and backed up on all of the REDUNDANT paperwork that you end up having to stay late, which in turn uses more labour hours and then you don't make your labour goal so THERE GOES MORE OF YOUR BONUS that is supposedly soooo easy to get. yeah right.
Then your boss says "never turn away customers"..ok so WHEN would you like me to serve these customers? She will allow someone to come in earlier but ONLY if you booK MORE appts so then you aren't even ahead of the game you're just making it WORSE by having 2 people run their asses off and have customers scream at them and walk out on your because you don't have time to deliver their portraits while you're in the middle of a 45 minute shoot with a screaming child and picky mother not to mention the passports that glare at you while you are in a shoot and constantly interrupt which makes the shoot even longer. CPI says they have excellent customer service and have recently implemented this new Customer Call back to retain customers where the managers have to call every single customer that had portraits taken and in essence try to con them into coming back in in 2 weeks and con them into buying MORE portraits. I"m pretty damn sure that customer's number that walked out of the studio WITHOUT their passport photo taken because the wait was 30 minutes long ISN'T on that call list. WHERE'S THIS CUSTOMER SERVICE? I sure as hell don't have time to serve every customer as soon as they walk in the door. You can walk into a clothing store and they have 3-4 people working at a time. Clothing stores are pretty much self serve except for the cash register. At the portrait studio we have to do EVERY SINGLE THING for our customers and we are allowed only ONE employee on at a time. We answer the phone, return messages from the answering machine, take & print passport photos, shoot sessions of cranky children with picky mothers who don't like any shot you take and then can't decide what she wants to order. We have to do it ALL for them and run our asses off, get screamed at by miserable customers who think they should be served FIRST before the people standing in line ahead of them. They implement more and more REDUNDANCY for the employees to do. When we sell a passport photo, we have to ring it through the SAS, write down the customers name, reciept number, quantity bought and price on a log, write on another log if we sold a passport case or not and then write the reciept number AGAIN and the amount on a "Going For The Green" log. We have to record EVERY SINGLE TRANSACTION we do EVERY SINGLE DAY on a Going for the green log. The SAS computer does NOTHING. It doesn't even ring things through properly because CPI is so cheap that they reworked another company's program to "work" for the studios. IT DOESN"T!!! The company is truly ridiculous. I have no idea what they do there but it sure isn't efficient in the least let alone have exceptional customer service.
I'd advise anyone to NOT work for CPI (Sears portrait studio, portrait studio in walmart, kiddie kandids, etc) because they don't care about their employees. They make you do a zillion things that are redundant and don't really need to be done AND the pay is absolute CRAP. We missed out on a raise one year because they put in the bonus plan. PFFFT!!! You can't possibly make bonus there because they make all these stipulations that you have to meet to GET bonus and they do everything they possibly can to make you miss your goals. We're supposed to see raises in March. It's well past March and there' s NO WORD on any raises.. of course. Let's put it off as long as we possibly can so we can POCKET all those wages that would have been made since the employees were SUPPOSED to get a raise and screw the employees out of their HARD EARNED MONEY!

CPI CORP. DON'T GO THERE!!!