An Eighteenth Open Letter to Lifetouch School Portraits

Dear Lifetouch School Portraits,

You guys over there continue to crack me up. You sent me a survey the other day, asking about my most recent Lifetouch experience, and you referred to me as “a valued customer.”

Really? Have you not read any of the letters I’ve sent you over the years? If I’m considered a valued customer, your business is circling the drain a lot faster than I thought it was.

Your survey email read as follows:

As a valued customer, we would love to get your feedback about your most recent school photography experience with Lifetouch.

If you already completed a survey, we thank you! If you have not, and have a moment, please take this brief survey and register for a chance to win a $100 gift card.

Thank you for providing your feedback.

 

My immediate reaction, besides, of course, uncontrollable laughter, was “Wow, a $100 gift card? Why don’t you just offer a free 5x7 image with my next order. That’s an equivalent prize based on your pricing, and seems like it would be less paperwork on your end.”

My most recent school photography experience with Lifetouch consisted of the following: I was driving Son Number Three to his sophomore check-in day a few weeks ago, and halfway to the high school I remembered that you would have employees taking pictures that day. (I still cannot, in good conscience, refer to them as “photographers.”)

I said, “Oh, yeah, by the way, school pictures are today, too.”

He was in a semi-presentable T-shirt, but his hair was a little on the “I don’t really care about my hair today” side.

He said, “Great. Thanks for the heads up.”

Then both of us continued to not care that school pictures were happening that day. I only assume you took his picture. That’s how my most recent school photography experience with Lifetouch went.

I may not care about picture day anymore because of you, but since I do care so much about helping you improve your business model, I figured I would click on the survey link and help you out. At a minimum, I was going to hunt around for the button labeled “See any one of my previous seventeen letters.”

I couldn’t find that button. I couldn’t even find the survey. You see, Lifetouch, this is why you are so loveable, and at the same time, such an absolute bane of so many parents’ existence.

I mean, we’ve all been aware for many years now that you refuse to hire actual photographers for your photography business. But apparently, you use that same unorthodox rebellious model in every aspect of your organization, including your web team.

I clicked on the link, told you that my child was in 10^th grade, hit the “next” button, and was greeted with this:  

This feedback.inmoment.com page can’t be found

No webpage was found for the web address: https://feedback.inmoment.com/websurvey/2/undefined HTTP ERROR 404

 

You’re a school picture company that can’t figure out how to take school pictures, so I don’t know why I expected you to be able to take survey answers either.

Stay adorable!

Yours always,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2023 Marc Schmatjen

 

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A Seventeenth Open Letter to Lifetouch School Portraits

Dear Lifetouch School Portraits,

I really have to give you some credit.

“For our photography skills?” you ask, hopefully?

Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. You’re horrible at the photography part of your photography business.

No, I have to give credit to your branding team for their self-awareness. (I’d like to think my previous sixteen letters may have guided them a bit, but there is still no actual evidence that you have read any of them.)

Son Number One just started his senior year of high school, and senior portraits for the yearbook are required to be completed by September. Your branding department obviously knew “Lifetouch” would never be able to secure the coveted senior portraits contract. You’ve done too much damage over the years.

There’s a three-mile-wide path of food-on-face, jacked-up shirt collar, torqued hair, forced smile destruction in your wake. The damage you have inflicted on the refrigerator doors of innocent parents and grandparents over the years is incalculable.

But you couldn’t just let another company – perhaps even a photography company that hires actual photographers – swoop in and steal all that business. So what did you do? You gave them a fake name, just like my wife did to me the first time I met her. Genius!

I’m sure after minutes of thought, you landed on “Prestige Photography.” Sounds legit. Sounds classy. You were probably even fairly sure ‘prestige’ was a real word, even if none of you knew what it meant.

Since you don’t hire actual photographers, you were able to severely lowball the competition and you landed the contract. Congratulations! Smart business move.

Unfortunately, however, you can only put so much lipstick on a pig, as it were. Your Prestige website to set up my appointment was just as wonky as its Lifetouch cousin, and I especially enjoyed the appointment reminder emails I received once a day literally every day for the seven days prior to the session, yet not one the morning of the actual day. Go figure.

As I have shared with you numerous times in the past, Son Number One was tragically born with CFSD (Chronic Forced Smile Disorder). His natural impulse in front of a camera is to make a face like he just caught his pinky toe on the bed frame. Because of that fact, my wife made me go with him for his senior portrait session, as comic relief, in hopes of getting a genuine smile for at least one of the pictures. “Prestige Photography” was cleverly disguised as a real studio, complete with multiple sets sporting various backgrounds that high school kids love, like gaudy Victorian living room, and yellow swirly wall.

It looked so professional in fact, that I was almost lulled into a false sense of security. That was until the costume lady put him in a tuxedo jacket that was roughly six or seven sizes too small and said, “Great.” It honestly looked like she might have been going for a “look how much I’ve grown since the fifth grade” thing.

I got the jacket issue fixed only to discover the tuxedo shirt was a complete fake. It was just the front of the shirt with fake buttons, held in place by a Velcro collar. Typical. And don’t even get me started on the graduation “gown.” It only went down to his waist!

I lost my focus again after the pictures had started, mainly due to a vexing Wordle situation, but I was snapped back to reality when I heard a concerning statement from the lady holding the camera. (I cannot in good conscience refer to your employees as “photographers”). She said, “I love these smiles.” I was off to the side without a very clear view, but I immediately knew his CFSD was flaring up. I have enough experience with your company to know what you consider to be a great smile.

I think I cracked off enough one-liners and stupid comments to get a real smile out of him. The only problem was my jokes were really landing with the lady holding the camera. She was laughing the whole time, so I’ve got my fingers crossed she managed to hold the camera steady.

Probably not, though. I have no way to tell, since you haven’t yet taken the very simple and obvious step of projecting the pictures to a monitor somewhere in the room so that parents can approve them on the go.

I mean, I know that kind of logical idea is well out of reach for Lifetouch, but I expected just a little more from a company called “Prestige.”

Can’t wait to see the proofs!

Yours always,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2022 Marc Schmatjen

 

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A Sixteenth Open Letter to Lifetouch School Portraits

Dear Lifetouch School Portraits,

School is only a month away from being over, and we never saw you on campus this year. I think it’s been a year and a half since we’ve seen each other! Surely you have finally had time to read my previous fifteen informative letters to you about your ridiculous business model and your general lack of photography skills. You desperately need to do so, because despite all my efforts to help you, on our last meeting, you actually said to the girl in front of Son Number Three, and I quote, “Oh, c’mon, give me a real smile.”

So as of early 2020 anyway, your hiring practices were still the same as they’ve always been:

Lifetouch: Are you currently breathing?

Unemployed person: Yes.

Lifetouch: Will you pass a background check?

UP: Yes.

Lifetouch: You’re hired.

UP: Umm… you guys heard me when I said I have no photography experience or experience with kids whatsoever, right. I actually thought this was a McDonald’s interview.

Lifetouch: Yep, you’re a perfect fit!

You’ve had a lot of free time and now that you’re owned by Shutterfly, surely you all have seen some of the pictures other people take to put in photobooks, on coffee mugs for grandma, mousepads, etc. You have to realize by now that it’s possible to take good pictures of children actually smiling. So, I assume you’ve spent the last eighteen months studying up on photography techniques, how to get children to genuinely smile, and what all the buttons do on your cameras, right?

No? Didn’t think so.

Here’s the crazy part, and the reason for my letter today. People with a phone that doubles as a camera (or the other way around, really) are able to take fantastic pictures of their smiling selves by just holding the device at arm’s length.

Do you realize what that means for you, the “professional photographers?” If people with a phone can take a better picture of themselves than you can of them, which you have proven time and time again to be the case, then that automatically invalidates the “professional” in your name.

It’s like going to a restaurant and paying $37 for a piece of burnt toast and the only jelly available is marmalade. We can make fantastic toast at our own homes for basically free, and we have a wide array of jam, jelly, and preserve options in our own refrigerators.

What I’m saying is, as far as photography goes, you make overpriced, crappy toast.

So here’s my new idea for you: Eliminate your photographer problem with the new Lifetouch Selfie App. On school picture day, kids will grab their cell phones and take selfies, then upload the one they want to your app. The school photos would then magically show up at their houses, printed on the fun glossy paper you guys have with the cool swirly blue school picture background automatically added in.

Photographer and COVID problems solved all in one little app. You’re welcome. I can’t wait to see what you come up with. Although, based on your previous track record, you will probably try to charge $39.99 for the app, it will freeze up and fail on Android devices, and only print pictures in sepia, but I’ve got my fingers crossed for you!

I will leave it with you and your app developers to handle the details, but I’m thinking your tagline could be, “Reach out and Lifetouch yourself!”

Or, maybe not.

Best of luck,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2021 Marc Schmatjen

 

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National Crappy School Picture Day

It’s almost here!! Tomorrow, September 10^th, is the fake national “day” that Lifetouch School Portraits is trying to start! It’s National School Picture Day tomorrow!!

As you can see by the excessive exclamation points, I can hardly contain my excitement.

If you have ever had a child in school, or been given a child’s school picture, you obviously already know that Lifetouch is not good at taking pictures. They built a business around going to schools and then selling parents pictures of their kids, but forgot the all-important step of finding photographers willing and able to take actually good pictures.

Now they are asking us to post our favorite old school pictures to the internet tomorrow with the tags #Lifetouch and #NationalSchoolPictureDay, in a desperate attempt to stay relevant since they can’t be on campus taking pictures of your child with food stuck to their face.

I know, I know. All you parents and grandparents out there are still sad about the fact that you won’t get school pictures this year. You always hope for the rare good ones, but there isn’t even the possibility of getting the inevitable crappy Lifetouch pictures of your little darlings this year. Never fear. We now have a solution that will get you both!

Step One: Dress your child in picture day clothes and put them in front of a finger-painted swirly gray or blue background. Get your cell phone ready and say “poopy butt.” Elementary schoolers will laugh immediately. You may need to say it two or three times for high schoolers, but they all laugh eventually. Snap a few photos while they are laughing and boom, you have an actually good school picture for the year.

Step Two: Post your old crappy Lifetouch school pictures on Facebook.

The best of both worlds!

Now remember, when you post those bad pictures, I don’t want you to use Lifetouch’s suggested tags. The people at Lifetouch do not possess the ability to tell a good picture from a bad one. The humor will be lost on them and they will only be encouraged.

I do, however, really want you to post your bad Lifetouch school pictures to MY Facebook page (Marc Schmatjen), so we can all get a kick out of just how much they suck at taking school pictures. If you want to give them tags, you can use #CrappyLifetouch and #NationalCrappySchoolPictureDay.

You can find me at facebook.com/schmatjen

We can start today. We don’t need to wait until September 10^th.

Let the crappiness begin!

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2020 Marc Schmatjen

 

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A Third Open Letter to the School District

Dear folks in charge of the decision making down at the School District,

I am writing to urge you to reopen our schools as soon as possible. I mean like tomorrow. We need to avert a monumental tragedy, and opening schools across the nation is the only way to be sure we can avoid it.

Schools need to reopen now in order to save Lifetouch School Portraits from certain doom. I fear they will go out of business otherwise.

We need Lifetouch in our lives! Obviously not for good quality school pictures. They are incapable of that. We need them for the joy they spread through the sheer absurdity of the images of our children that they attempt to pass off as good quality school pictures.

Without the fall and spring comic relief that Lifetouch offers us as parents, raising our children would simply be overwhelming.

This matter is extremely urgent, as Lifetouch is already showing signs of desperation. They are clawing at the walls of their school-less prison, and they need our help. They have already gone as far as attempting to create a new “national day.”

Emails have been blasted to anyone who has ever had even the remotest contact with their little photography hobby shop, announcing the creation of “National School Picture Day” on September 10^th.

In addition to some “nominate a great teacher” thing, they are asking us to upload our previous school pictures that they took, so we can all create a national yearbook.

National School Picture Day, established by Lifetouch, is an opportunity to relive our school pictures. It’s a chance to bond over the fads and faces that make school pictures such wonderful artifacts. And, this year, we’re creating the ultimate yearbook.

As an example of how ludicrous they are as a company, and why this type of comedy is so valuable to the mental health and stability of us parents, one must look no further than this email, keeping in mind they sent it to us on purpose.

The email contains three examples of the amazing school portraits they have captured over the years. One shows a boy in giant reading glasses, with awful lighting resulting in his glasses casting shadows on his face, and his head casting a shadow on the time-honored swirly gray school picture background behind him. We can see that he is, at least, smiling, even though his chin is being partially obscured by his enormous shirt collar, which is also casting a shadow.

Another is a photo of a little girl not even looking at the camera. Instead, she is closing her eyes and turning her head. This unfortunate situation is offset, however, by more bad lighting, as per standard.

Think about this. These are the pictures that Lifetouch is purposely showing us in an attempt to keep their business relevant!

“Hey America, check out these crappy pictures we took and charged these families money for! Please engage with us online so we can stay alive and continue to be your go-to crappy school photography company for years to come.”

I mean, that is just gold, people. That is the kind of comic relief that you can’t put a price on. Humor like that can pull you out of even the darkest parenting funk. We need Lifetouch to stay in business, even if the business they are in is entirely undefinable.

We need schools back open so there will be long lines of kids with food stuck to their faces to shuffle into the seats in front of the inadequate and poorly placed lights.

Open up our schools and help keep this national treasure alive and well. It’s not a question of whether we want school pictures. We need our school pictures!!

We need the good ones we take ourselves and send to relatives, and we need the ridiculous ones from Lifetouch to keep us all going as a people, united in humor.

Open schools tomorrow, save Lifetouch, and save our nation.

Yours in educational excellence through continued partnership,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2020 Marc Schmatjen

 

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A Fifteenth Open Letter to Lifetouch School Portraits

Dear Lifetouch School Portraits,

I know that since you can’t visit schools this spring, you are all probably working from home and finally reading the fourteen previous letters I’ve graciously sent you over the years to help you improve your business model. (Cliff Notes on my last letter, in case you’re super-busy like me: Hiring photographers from the DMV or the passport office would be a great start.)

I’m writing again today not to offer you more amazing and free advice on how to improve your little photography hobby shop over there, but simply to let you know that I’m sad.

I am sad that we can’t be together this spring. I know you feel the same way, because you send me weekly emails expressing the same sentiment. You reassure me that you are here for me in these troubled and unprecedented times.

You remind me that you “love being a place where you can capture memories, stay connected to your loved ones, and build community,” and that “in the midst of COVID-19, and school closings, we will continue to be that place where you can share & connect.”

I mean, I don’t miss you that way. Sure, you have certainly captured some memories for me over the years, but they were mostly memories of how bad you are with hair, shirt collars, food stuck to faces, getting kids to smile, and just general photography of humans.

As far as helping people stay connected to loved ones and build community, I have no idea how you ever did that or plan on ever doing that, but cool.

No, the reason I miss you is because it’s spring, and spring has always been the time when you took pictures of my kids that I never authorized, never asked for in any way, and never wanted at all.

Despite all that, you diligently took spring photos of my boys in their best stained T-shirts and soccer shorts, and promptly printed and sent me reams and reams of pictures that I still hadn’t authorized, ordered, asked for, or wanted in any way.

This spring is special, and the fact that we won’t be together this year is breaking my heart. You see, we’ve been quarantined, and the boys haven’t had haircuts in three months. This year’s spring pictures could have been epic.

I could have bought a “vote for Pedro” shirt for Son Number Two, given him bigger glasses, and convinced him to stare into the camera with an idiotic mouth-breather expression. Uncanny.

We could have put zinc oxide all over Son Number Three’s nose and sent him to school in an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt. He has loads of blond hair and he already has a natural dazed look of utter confusion, so it would have been awesome.

Son Number One’s hair has gotten the craziest, so we naturally would have had to go all out with him. His hair is dark and turns out to be curly when grown out, so he has developed a pretty decent afro for a white kid. Money would have been no object.

I would have bought him a yellow number ten soccer jersey and invested in some quality glue-on mustache options to be sure we got the look just right. A trip to the salon to get those frosted blonde highlights just right and maybe perm out those ring curls a little and he would have been amazing.

You surely understand now why I am so distraught. By doing nothing other than paying attention to when picture day was and making sure they were dressed appropriately, you would have automatically provided me with glossy copy after copy of a perfect not-exactly-red-headed Napoleon Dynamite, a pint-sized Jeff Spicoli, and a truly glorious young Carlos Valderrama.

I still wouldn’t have paid you for them, but I would have definitely kept them this year!

I actually miss you. Who woulda thought, huh?

See you in the fall,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2020 Marc Schmatjen

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A Fourteenth Open Letter to Lifetouch School Portraits

Dear Lifetouch School Portraits,

You know, fellas, life is funny, isn’t it? I mean, just when I thought there wasn’t any more advice I could give you about how to improve your thriving picture business, life throws me another photography curveball.

I get the feeling you aren’t reading my letters, so just in case that’s true, here’s where we stand:

I think you’re pretty bad at your overall job of managing the school picture process. Central to that, I think you just kinda suck at taking good pictures of kids. There’s really no other way to say it.

Based on the results we’ve seen over the years from our three boys, I’d guess you land somewhere in the fifty percent range. That’s an F on any grading scale. Unless we’re talking about the elementary school grading scale. We don’t do letters or numbers anymore, so your grade would be “Standard Not Met.” Still sucky.

After thirteen letters to you and one to Shutterfly urging them to back out of their ill-advised purchase of your little photography hobby shop over there, I thought I was just plain out of free advice to give you. Thankfully for you, I was wrong.

You see, as we’ve talked about many times in the past, Son Number One has a bad case of CFSD – Chronic Forced Smile Disorder. Unless you can get him to relax and laugh a little, his camera smile looks like he just stepped barefoot on a pile of Legos.

In your last twenty-one tries - twice a year from his preschool postgraduate year at Transitional Kindergarten all the way until this year in ninth grade - I’m not sure you have ever once managed to get a decent picture of him. Son Number Two and Three seem to have slightly better control of their facial muscles, but you still manage to screw them up quite a bit.

Anyhow, Son Number One is taking a trip soon, and we needed to get his passport renewed. The city of Roseville, CA has a passport office, which turned out to be nice because we didn’t have to go to the post office this time. I don’t know why, but the post office just feels as hopeless as the DMV, but without all the fun people watching.

Anyway, we were happy about the City of Roseville office because they not only let us set an appointment, but they offered picture services as well. We were renewing all three boys’ passports, so it was nice not to have to go somewhere else to get the pictures taken.

I would say that you might be able to see where this is going, but I’ve seen your pictures, so I’m not sure you can see much of anything. I’ll spell it out for you.

A lady who works every single day on a stool at a counter behind a glass wall in a drab and dreary city office building, picked up a handheld digital camera, and against the background of a plain white city office building wall, took three pictures of our boys that are better than anything you have ever been able to produce for us.

She actually took one of the best pictures of Son Number One that we have ever seen. His smile is natural and bright. He looks radiant with joy and brimming with youthful exuberance. The best you have ever done with him is “possibly not constipated.”

So, there it is, Lifetouch. That’s how bad you are. Lifetime government employees in hopeless little square offices take pictures that are a thousand times better than your “professional” photographers can muster. I’m not sure what you can do about that.

I don’t think there are enough city passport employees that you could lure away from the counter, even if you could match that sweet government pay scale and pension plan. There’s probably enough DMV driver’s license photographers out there, which would obviously be a huge improvement to your business model, but you have the whole government pension problem there too.

Maybe you guys could just figure out who trains these city, county, and state photographers who take such amazing identification photos, and lure that training staff away to help with your folks.

I’ll leave it up to you to figure out.

We just can’t wait to send photocopies of our boys’ passport pictures out in the Christmas letters this year!

Happy holidays,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2019 Marc Schmatjen

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An Open Letter to Shutterfly, Regarding Lifetouch

Dear Shutterfly,

Last November was the first time I heard your name associated with the venerable, dare I say, tour de force of a company that is Lifetouch School Portraits.

It happened when Lifetouch sent me an email with promo codes to create free Shutterfly photo books.

A few days later, Lifetouch sent another email explaining that “We were a little too excited to deliver your free Shutterfly photo book offer so you may have received a code that doesn’t work.”  I guess they included new promo codes that may or may not have actually worked. I’ll never know, because I never tried them.

I never tried the original promo codes either, because the pictures Lifetouch was offering to put into a free Shutterfly photo book were taken by Lifetouch.

I don’t even have to go back and look at them. I just know.

Son Number One will have a forced, pained smile on his face, like he just stepped barefoot onto a bunch of seashells.

Son Number Two’s hair will be all over the place and his glasses will be visibly smudged and probably on his face crooked. His smile is a fifty-fifty toss-up.

Son Number Three will have some sort of food or condiment prominently displaced somewhere on his face or head, and his “smile” will either look pained, quizzical, confused, nervous, or, like last year’s picture, strangely rodent-ish. It will look like anything other than his actual beautiful, joyous smile.

I’m not sure why I would want any of that in a photo book, free or otherwise.

Lifetouch screwing up the codes didn’t surprise me one bit, because I have a long history with them. I have written them many helpful letters over the years (thirteen to be exact) giving them tons of free advice on how to take passable pictures of children, how to improve their business model, and how to just generally not suck at what they do.

As far as I know, no one at Lifetouch has ever read a single one of my letters. They certainly haven’t taken any of my free advice, like, maybe wiping the macaroni and cheese off the kid’s face before snapping the picture, and stuff like that.

You might not have as much direct personal experience with them, but the fact that they screwed up the free promo code email should have been a major warning sign for you.

But instead of running away as fast as you could, apparently you just went ahead and purchased Lifetouch. And according to Forbes, you paid $825 million for them! You really should have called me first. That was not a good idea.

If you really wanted to get into the school picture business so badly, I honestly believe you could have cornered the market for less than ten or twelve thousand dollars by hiring retired postal employees to take pictures at the schools with their personal cell phones. Seriously.

Anyway, today I received a desperate plea from “Lifetouch + Shutterfly” that my Fall Portraits would soon expire, and I was given helpful portrait ID numbers and access codes for all three boys so I could purchase them and have you preserve them forever.

Sounds like you guys over at Shutterfly are trying to figure out how to get back some of those wisely-spent millions. And how do I know those codes will even work?

Never mind that – back to my original point here, Shutterfly. The pictures you want me to buy were taken by Lifetouch. If I wouldn’t buy the individual paper pictures, why would I buy a hardcover book of them? Or a coffee mug? Or a pillow? Or a wrapped canvas wall hanging?

He has mustard on his face!

I have to look at food on his face almost every time he’s actually in the room. Why would I want to immortalize it on my wall, as well?

He’s smiling like he just backed into an electric fence!

Why would I want to put that on a pillow? Pillows are supposed to make people comfortable!

Have your financial people call me. We should talk.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2019 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

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