Bottom post of the previous page:
I think there's this huge group of people in society who don't understand the fucking concept of the "Service Cost".Stickymayhem wrote:I tried every possible configuration of this and it just never worked. If you put almost any barrier to entry literally no one will ever come.oranges wrote:Why would you not take payment up front?
My idea was to put in a deposit of £60 and you get five pictures with that but it was so much harder to get anyone to come and you'd almost never get anyone who would be willing to pay more than that. They just saw it as 60 quid for 5 pictures that they could just snap in the bathroom mirror for free instead.
The studios with hundreds of photographers couldn't figure this out and neither could I. Portrait photography is just a weird mess that's dying right now.
The business basically relies on good-hearted customers who won't abuse the system. You'd get one of these people who will actually see the effort and value in this stuff and they'd pay hundreds of pounds for it. But it was so rare to get them.
EDIT: Also photographs are incredibly hard to value. Once you've taken 400 pictures they are in a weird state of being technically worthless but with a nebulous kind of effort behind them that's hard for customers to really get a grasp of. They just see several hundred pictures and wonder why I'm being a dick and not putting all of them on the disk instead of just 5. The CD costs the same either way right?
Because you're too fucking lazy to do it yourself, you come out to get someone else to do it. Because they do it for you, you get charged for the materials used PLUS the service cost, because that's how a business fucking works
It irritates me when people come into the shop where I work, ask for a drink and then balk at the price because "they could make it at home". Well, that's nice. Go home and make it then.
I'm pretty sure people are just spoilt by chains like McDonalds where they sell everything dirt cheap, because it likely is mostly dirt and they have such good supply contracts due to years of business.