Sending them to everyone out there except for me– the OWNER and PURCHASER of said photos.

What I already knew: Professional wedding photos are done by vendors of higher class than Wal-Mart.

What I know now: Wal-Mart can’t be trusted with your regular family-vacation type photos either.

Let me summarize how I arrived at this realization…

After one of the most brief, but enjoyable, family vacation over the summer, I thought, “Hey, I think it would be cool if I sent my parents the printed photos of the time we shared.” This had been the first time my parents and sister ever visited New York city and we had really done a lot of the tourist things to do there. We went to the wax museum, Central Park, down to Battery Park and everything in between. I had about 70 quality pictures that I wanted them to have in the end.

After all the sorting, tagging and uploading that is involved in uploading photos to Wal-Mart’s website, I went ahead and placed my order. I paid with my credit card and requested their “ship-to-store” service. I was informed that this order would be ready for pick-up at my selected store by August 31, 2007.

August 31st rolled around and nothing. I called the store and some of the most unfriendly photo center employees let me know that they had no such order so will you shut up about it? I called up the customer service number and called for several days attempting to reach a live person on their 1-800 number and then called the local store to see if, by chance, my photos had made it during this time. Worst communication disconnect ever. The 1-800 people said the store had it, the store people said that they didn’t and sent me back to the 1-800 number, the 1-800 people said it HAS to be at the store since it’s the only way I could have gotten the automatically generated “Ready for pick up” email produced when they scan in my order at the store, and that’s when I called the local store for the last time.

I called them when the customer service line had their system “down” … for nearly a full week. They kept telling me that when their system would come back up they would contact the store on my behalf, make sure the order wasn’t there and then offer me a couple of options. Because their system was down, they couldn’t look up any of my order info, so I said, “Maybe I can talk to the store people about this.” In retrospect, I had way too much faith on the photo center employees at Wal-Mart. Heck, I had too much faith in Wal-Mart in general. The girl who answered my call said, “oh, yeah, you’ve been the one calling about that order. It’s not here.” The one calling about that order? I can imagine this was the name I picked up among the photo center employees. “Oh, is is the one calling about that order, again? Geez, tell her I’m not here… and neither are her photos.” Rolling of the eyes included.

Anyway, since it was clearly over the store people’s heads how the “Ready for pick up” email I received is generated only when they scan in my order into their store, I gave up calling them. I decided to stick with the 1-800 people who, I can only hope, get some training on this type of thing. Once they miraculously got their system back up, they called and found out the same thing I had found out: The local store is completely incompetent.

I was offered two choices: 1) Complete refund, seeing as how they may not have held up their end of the deal, but made sure to bill me anyway. 2) Replace my order with free shipping to my parent’s house instead of the store.

I chose Option 2. (WRONG!)

The replacement order was set to arrive at the house on September 18th, 2007. About half a month after the original order was supposed to arrive to their own store. Will you be surprised if I say that the order did not arrive on September 18th… or at all? Well, surprise! No photos! I did get another email, though, that said, “Your photos have shipped.” This leads me to believe either they’re processing my photos multiple times and not sending them out, or processing them out and someone along the way is keeping them. Either way, I keep thinking about how there are personal photographs of my family and me out there, in some stranger’s hands, who is supposed to pass them along to get them to me, but instead is keeping them or throwing them out. No, my pictures are not the scandalous type that celebrities take and have revealed, but they are personal nonetheless.

On top of it all, Wal-Mart would not care if I never received my order because they billed me nearly a month ago. Without me calling, they would never know the difference. So here I am, Wal-Mart. I’m calling you on Monday and demanding a refund because this is just plain ridiculous. I don’t want another replacement order that will end up in another set of photos mysteriously disappearing and I don’t want another promise that it will get to me this time. At the rate this is going, half of the U.S. will know where my family and I went for our vacation this past summer and the only ones who won’t have a copy of it will be the actual people in the photos.