How would you handle it?

[thomasgeorge]

How long areyou required by law to keep the originals before they are considered abandoned and you can dispose of them? Tom

[Mike]

Tom, that is a really good question, and I do not have an answer for it. In the course of 20 years of doing business here, I have about 40 to 50 (and thats a really rough estimate, I am not going to the store room to count!) orginals that have been left here for what ever reason. We make 3 calls to try to get them to pick up their work, then we just file them away. A number of the customers moved while we were doing the work and they left no forewarding address or phone number. In one case a customer left the orginals here while she went home to talk to her husband about the pricing. Said she would call us back and let us know, we finally called her after a couple of months and she got angry and told us not to bug her so quickly. Its now been at least 10 years and we are still waiting for her call. Needless to say we will have to re-estimate the charges on that job!
I am sure that there is some kind of law about this, and I am even more sure that the law is different in every state. A call to your state attorney general would most likely get you on the right trail.
Mike

[Ed_L]

Mike,

That's a problem we haven't discussed at all (people not picking up their originals), and it certainly has potential to become problematic. I wonder if something could be put in a contract to specify how long you would be liable for the originals?

If you've been in the restoration business for 20 years, I'm wondering if you do all restorations digitally now or if you offer other services as well.

Ed

[DJ Dubovsky]

I guess I haven't done a big enough business of this yet to have the originals left to store. Can't even imagine the person who would take the effort to get them restored and then leave them and the restoration behind. Hope I never get any of those.
DJ

[thomasgeorge]

That would be a good thing to look into. I know that there are specific time limits here that a person has to pick up their property and if exceeded the service provider is free,after certain minor legal steps, to dispose of said property any way they see fit, to recoup whatever they can in compensation. Tom

[Ed_L]

Surely something like that could apply to many businesses. Maybe clothes left at a dry cleaners or something similar. It shouldn't be hard to find out what the laws are for something of this nature.

Ed

[DJ Dubovsky]

To be on the safe side, before discarding the items left behind by customers, remember to document your attempts to contact the individuals to pick up the items. The best way to do this is to make copies of your correspondences with the customer stating the deadline for picking up their items and the ultimate loss if they choose not to. Then send them registered return reciept mail. This creates a paper trail of your sincerity to return the items involved and it also proves that they recieved these letters and chose to disreguard them. I would give them a safe time limit of 30 days upon reciept of your letter as a safe time.
DJ

[Mike]

<If you've been in the restoration business for 20 years, I'm wondering if you do all restorations digitally now or if you offer other services as well. Ed>

I hope that you are not too confused here, we have been operating a photo studio for 20 years and have always offered copy services. We contracted out all retouching and restoration work when we first started. We had a lot of customers that just wanted copies, with no other work required. We started digital services about 4 years ago and started doing more and more of our retouch/restoration type work ourselves. I think that this is rather typical of a lot of photo studios that have entered into the magic kingdom of 1's and 0's.

The decsion to use or not use digital depends on the job. Since most of our jobs seem to be original prints smaller than 8x10 and they usually want their finished product about the same size, then digital is a really great tool. However we do get a larger size original now and then, with a final product that sometimes gets as large as 16x20 or bigger. Then we have a debate about the best way to do the job. Several years ago (when digital was much newer) we had such a job and the people who did it for us did it both digitaly and with film, and in this case the film was somewhat better.

I really think that digital is really a great tool, but then again so is film. I never met a good carpenter that only had 1 hammer or 1 saw, so why should I only have 1 camera or 1 way to do a task?
One should be able to look at the task and pick the best tool to work with.
_____________

Customers not picking up work is not a new problem. Years ago we went to a 50% prepay just to make sure that we would at least not lose any money on the job. We even have a complete set of proofs from a wedding that the bride and groom (nor anybody else from their families) have ever seen. I think the marriage was over quicker than the 10 days or so it took to get the proofs done!!!

Making a contract, with some kind of time limit inserted in there might work, but if you want to do that, I would write something up, then go buy an hour of some lawyers time to make sure it is going to work in your location. If you put it in writing, then it had better be right or your XXX is hanging out for someone to bite on!



Mike

[Ed_L]

All very good points. It seems to be that getting half down is getting to be headed toward the norm rather than the exception for many different service related businesses. And there's good reason for that.

Out of curiosity, do you normally use medium format for copy jobs?

Ed

[Vikki]

Another idea,
What about adding a $NTE line?

[Mike]

Ed
When we used film, we used Kodak Techical Pan, a film that is virtually grainless. I preferred to use 35mm if I could (it would make great 16x20's) but if my retoucher needed to do any work on the negatives before we printed them, then we would use medium format.

Vikki
OK, I give up, what does $NTE stand for? And if you think I get confused here, you should see me trying to figure out some of plates people put on their cars!!!!!

Mike

[Vikki]

I'm sorry.
It's: "Not To Exceed" a specific dollar amount.

[Jim Conway]

I guess the best you can expect here is called experience. You'll waste more energy and money trying to collect or trying to prove you are right than it's worth. We don't have the problem because we work with signed orders and 50% deposits on individuals and purchase orders from business and institutions.

Spelling everything out up front is essential. If the job is too complex for a firm estimate up front we take it a step at a time -charge the customer for a negative, cleaning, testing and a proof - show the proof print and go from there. On oil paintings and other high ticket jobs we take the same approach and show the prints before we continue on to the art work phase. Customers appreciate this and often never look at the proofs believe it or not - when you call and tell them to come in and take a look the rest of the job for example, will be another $270 ...they will usually say "Oh that's OK, I'm sure you'll do it the best way - just go ahead with it" and give us the bank card authorization for the added cost to finish the work on the phone. .

All of this doesn't mean that we don't have a pile of prints accumulated over the years that have never been picked up that we still have money due on (and many more that are paid in full) but we just keep reminding the customers from time to time and don't push it at all - and we never release the originals unless the full order has been paid. Learning that "the customer is always right" isn't easy but it's a good way to stay in business so my take on this would be to bite the bullet and smile! Give the client back his original while you are still smiling and go to work on the systems you are using by convincing yourself that the customer was not at fault!

Jim Conway

[Jim Conway]

I forgot the insurance! As some of you already know from my previous posts elsewhere in this forum, we insure the customers originals while they are in our care (from $200 up) per order.

If the prints are not picked up in a few weeks, we send out a letter stating that our coverage is not valid on any order or original left in our care for over 90 days and we can no longer be responsible for them in any way after (date).

In the case of prints left for estimates, that's reduced to 30 days.

It's an effective reminder!

Jim Conway

[Doug Nelson]

Jim:

Do us all a favor and start a new thread about how to insure a user's originals. I wouldn't have a clue how to even start doing something like that.