ScanCafe - the cost of no hassle.

I have a wicked flatbed scanner. The thing is amazing. It scans everything. However, when it comes to scanning old film negatives, as you can imagine, it's incredibly time-consuming. A colleague of mine put me on to a company called ScanCafe - one of an increasing number of companies who will do the donkey-work for you. There's a few others, but ScanCafe is massively undercutting them all right now, with discounted rates and Christmas sales. They're a full 15c per negative cheaper than their nearest competition, and that includes shipping and tracking. You send your stuff to an amalgamation centre in California, and from there, palettes are UPS'd to their scanning facility in India. Get this - everything is hand-scanned, and they're still cheaper than the US competition. I think the difference is that the guys in India are probably pleased to be providing a service whereas their US counterparts probably see it as one step up from flipping burgers. ScanCafe ask you to estimate the number of negatives up front, and charge you 50% when you order. When your scanning is complete, they publish albums in your account online so you can accept / reject each image. In the end you only pay for the ones you keep as long as it's 80% of the order or more. In my case, if I take every scan, the total cost to me is $257. Sounds a lot, right? Lets see you sit at home and hand scan 1000 negatives (the size of my first order). For me, $257 is the cost of no hassle.
I'll let you know how it goes, but right now, there's a sturdy box UPS-ing its way to their amalgamation centre with my first batch of negatives in it.
Their site : ScanCafe. If you sign up and order before November 8th, there's also a 20% discount coupon : LAST4XMAS.

Why do people still use Jiffy Lube?

You might as well ask the same question in England: why do people still use Kwik-Fit? I ask because of all the people I know who've used Jiffy Lube here in the US, and Kwik-Fit in England, only one has anything good to say about them. The rest are horror stories ranging from the mildly funny to the litigious. For example one of my wife's friends recently went to a Jiffy Lube for one of their "signature" oil changes. The next day, her SUV was parked in our drive and I commented that it was leaking oil. The colour drained from her boyfriend's face as she said "Oh - I took it to Jiffy Lube yesterday". After some not especially complicated diagnosis, it turned out they never bothered to tighten the oil filter when they put it back on, so it had been spewing oil all over the inside of her engine compartment.
This is certainly not the first time I've heard of, or directly experienced this level of service from these places. Apart from anything else there's the up-sell scam they all run. You know the one - where everything was fine when you took the car in, but after the oil change it now miraculously needs new wiper blades or CV boots. When we lived in England, I even experienced one of these places that cut a friend's brake lines so that he couldn't leave the shop without paying to have them all re-done. The litigation on that one found them wholly responsible because they were caught doing it on their own surveillance cameras.
Countless news programs have exposed these places for everything from scamming customers by charging for work and not doing it, to deliberate sabotage, to just making stuff up. Their staff are generally clueless too. A colleague of mine suffered from a catalytic converter theft a couple of years ago. He trailered his truck to the nearest one-stop-shop and their first question was "are you sure it had a catalytic converter in the first place?" followed by "are you sure it was on there when you drove home last night?". (in case you're not mechanically inclined, every car has had a cat for decades, and most modern cars simply won't drive with a chunk of the exhaust missing because of the lack of back-pressure. Oh and the noise would have given it away, obviously).
I just can't fathom why anyone still uses these places.