Pros
--Lot's of responsibility is given to you right away, and promotions are easy to come by. I was actually hired on as a studio associate who was being trained to become a studio manager, though I had no prior photography experience whatsoever. --This is a solitary position, so if you like working alone, this is the job for you. I worked in the Dallas-Fort Worth area stores, and the majority of the time, there was only one associate who worked alone in the studio all day.
Cons
--The company pays very little, yet expects you to be a professional photographer in a non-professional environment. They want non-experienced people because they realize that no professional photographer would do that kind of work for $8.00 an hour. --The "top-down" marketing pitch is ridiculous. We would pull in a customer from Wal-Mart, shoot their session, make enhancements to their pictures, and instead of giving them the inexpensive promotional offer on which we brought them in, we would start talking about our packages--starting with the most expensive at $379. Really, this company must be crazy thinking that customers in this economy have $379 on hand to spend on portraits. Are you kidding me? --They expect too much of you in very little time. When I was hired, I alerted my manger to the fact that I had NO experience whatsoever with photography--aside from taking pictures with my cell phone. Yet, after 40 hours spread over 5 days of training (24 hours of watching her and the remaining 16 on my own), I was expected to be a professional concerning lighting, posing, being efficient with the huge monster of a camera, and customer service. When I admitted that I was nervous working in the studio by myself after these 40 hours, my manager acted like I was an idiot. --Fellow associates can be very unprofessional and unorganized, making your job more difficult. They do not file things properly and misplace shipments, preventing the studio from functioning effectively.. I was shocked by the way in which I was taught to get potential customers. The exact words from one of my trainers: "Don't try to talk to women if they are with their husbands because men don't like to spend a lot of money and they will just talk their women out of it. If you can, talk to Mexican or black people because they usually have a lot of kids and family members and can be a little too proud about it--but you have to be careful with Mexicans because they don't always speak English and will expect their kids to translate for them. Also, a lot of them don't have any money." Um...WHAT? --The district manager expects you to control situations that are not in your hands. I worked in a low income area, and many of our customers skipped out on paying for their portraits but were hard to contact because their phones were disconnected or they had changed addresses. I was given ridiculously long phone lists of customers to call everyday to let them know their portraits were in and still had an oustanding balance. Some of the numbers were no longer in service, and those I did contact would give me a date of when they would be in but then skipped out. The DM would get angry because all of these folders of unpaid for portraits would be in our cabinet, but what can you do about it besides call the customers to let them know? Really, I could go on all day, but I think I'll stop here. Crappy pay, crappy bosses, crappy conditions. This company is just crap overall. I don't recommend that anyone get a job here.