If you’ve been meaning to have some pictures taken at your local Target Portrait Studio, hurry up: This week, the retailer announced to employees that the remaining studios will close at the end of this month.
There aren’t many of the studios across the whole Target chain: after a handful of studios closed in July, there were only 138 left, and two more have closed since then. Compare that to more than 1,800 Target stores across the country.
The studios are operated by LifeTouch, a company out of Minnesota that has its own portrait studios as well as a business taking pictures for church directories, yearbooks, school pictures, and sports teams.
Target began offering the service in 1996 as department store photo studios faded, but Americans’ photo habits have changed, and that change apparently doesn’t include as many professional portraits as it used to.
Target broke the news to its employees this week, telling them that the photo studio leases end on Jan. 28. A Lifetouch executive confirmed the planned closing and the end date to Consumerist. Target hasn’t yet responded to our request for a comment, and we will update this post when it does.
Other Target stores that have closed their studios have re-purposed the space in ways that are more useful to customers and to the store, like an expanded customer service area for online order pickups, or a licensed Starbucks store.
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