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A note to readers: I am Keith Osbon, founder of Memory Fortress. As justification for this article, I have nine years of experience owning and operating my company, which digitizes old videos, photos, movie film, and slides, and is a direct competitor to Legacy Box. In other words, I am an expert in this industry and have a unique view of the situation at Legacy Box. In fact, their company is located only about 100 miles from ours. Over these years, I have heard way too many horror stories from their customers who later became our customers. It’s almost like some of them have PTSD from the poor experience at Legacy Box. There are plenty of industry standards, and Legacy Box meets almost none of them.
My customer Karen put this article on her website legacyboxreviews.com in November of last year after a bad experience with Legacy Box. She later became a customer of Memory Fortress and we were able to fix all the issues she experienced prior. Many of the issues she experienced were things I have heard before. How this company got this big with so many operational issues is a story for another time. If you are reading this now, consider this one of the best warnings you are going to get. Your memories are precious, and Legacy Box is simply a bad actor in an otherwise good industry.
In my opinion, this is a very important article that needs to be read. I would encourage all our competitors to link to this blog post, to help raise awareness to the public.
I’ve edited Karen’s blog post lightly for accuracy. Most of the content is hers (including all her creative AI images!), I have simply added a few clarifying details in certain places. So, Karen, take it away …
Legacy Box Reviews
Let’s answer the question right from the start: Legacy Box reviews are terrible because their customer service is non-existent. There are many other reasons that the company has nearly 3,000 poor reviews across all the platforms I could find. But when you don’t care at all about your customer base, it shows. And all those customers who not only feel burned, but were actually burned, they tend to write about it.
I’m not a negative person by my nature, and I don’t like exposing wrongdoings in a public forum as a general rule. But when a company is so willfully deliberate about screwing and misleading their customers, someone needs to say something. And when the business in question involves the priceless lifetime of memories from US citizens, it makes it ten times worse. Simply put, Legacy Box does not care about you as a customer at all.
What is Legacy Box?
Different Names
The company actually goes under three completely different brand names. One is Legacy Box, one is Southtree, and the third name is Kodak Digitizing. If you rasied your eyebrows at that last one, allow me to continue. The company has existed in one form or another for nearly 40 years. Each time they burn out one brand name, they simply create another one to fool the public into thinking its something better. All three brand names operate under one roof, in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
The Southtree name dates back to the 1980s. While it still exists as a brand, the company has recently focused much more on the Kodak Digitizing and Legacy Box brand names for marketing purposes. Do not confuse the Kodak name with the actual Kodak company. The company was able to access the name once Kodak went bankrupt a few years back.
Unmarked Location
The building is a warehouse in an average industrial section near downtown. There are no markings anywhere to let you know the company is there. They DO NOT want the public walking in, for any reason. I was there on a weekend on a trip to see Rock City and Ruby Falls, and I decided to drive a mile out of my way to see where the company was. I parked my car and walked around the block, unable to ascertain which of the many warehouses belonged to Legacy Box.
Start With The Customer
The problems with Legacy Box, in all its various incarnations, are obvious once you take on the point-of-view of the customer.
What Is The Customer Actually Purchasing?
You as the customer are buying a cardboard box for $50, $100, $300 … whatever they convinced you to pay. You are NOT buying the promise that they will do anything with the box once they receive it, filled with your memories. This is the scam: Legacy Box is under no obligation to process your memories. They put a box for sale online, you bought it, and they took your money. End of story from their point of view!
See why it’s a such a profitable business model (on paper)? That box cost them less than a dollar, plus a few more dollars to ship it to you. Assuming an average sale price of $200, they keep at least $190 as profit. They don’t want you to ever send the box in. THEY ARE PRAYING YOU NEVER SEND THE BOX IN. They have lots of small print that you probably didn’t read that says they are in the business of selling cardboard boxes.
This distinction is hugely important. Unlike other digitization companies (which sell various digitization services), Legacy Box actually sells boxes. If you’ve ever had the misfortune to be a customer, you know the original box takes weeks to arrive. (They had all your money on Day 1.) Then once you send it in, they take 8-12 weeks to digitize your memories. That is not a typo. The industry standard is 8-12 DAYS. Legacy Box takes 8-12 WEEKS. (They had all your money on Day 1.) Are you seeing the problem here?
Why Does The Customer Fall For It?
Let me ask you three questions:
- How often do you eat at McDonald’s?
- How often do you eat at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse?
- How often do you eat at Medieval Times?
And now let me tell you the statistical answers:
- How often do you eat at McDonald’s? : 1-2 times each month
- How often do you eat at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse? : maybe 1-2 times every five years
- How often do you eat at Medieval Times? : maybe 1-2 times in my life, if at all
Let’s translate that into expectations:
- How often do you eat at McDonald’s? : I know exactly what to expect, I do it all the time.
- How often do you eat at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse? : I sort of know what to expect, I’ve done it a few times.
- How often do you eat at Medieval Times? : I have no idea what to expect because I’ll only do this 1-2 times ever.
Digitizing your memories in bulk is like going to Medieval Times. You hope it’s going to be good, but you really don’t know for sure. But here’s the deal: Once-in-a-lifetime purchases BETTER BE REAL GOOD. That is the expectation of the customer. The reason the customer is fooled by Legacy Box every time is that they have no prior comparison on which to base their decision. While many will do research and find the terrible Legacy Box reviews all over the internet, many more customers will not. This is why the worst company in the industry still does very well financially. They take your money BEFORE they have to do anything at all. In a true service industry, payment comes at the end.
(Side note: Not trying to compare Medieval Times to Legacy Box! Medieval Times is FAR better and certainly worth going to!)
A Closer Look At Legacy Box Reviews
TrustPilot Reviews (scam)
Legacy Box used to have an icon in the top corner of their website, showing thousands of 5-star reviews. When you clicked on it, you were taken to a website called TrustPilot. This is purely a pay-to-play scheme. TrustPilot is a well-known scam online. Any company can purchase thousands of positive reviews if they want to. The problem if you are Legacy Box is that you MUST purchase thousands of positive reviews. Why? Because real reviews also happen on that website. So if you buy 2,000 5-star reviews, and then 200 actual customers give 1-star reviews, you still have an average of 4.63 stars. Not bad! If you only purchased 200 top reviews instead of 2,000, the average would fall to 3.0.
Legacy Box has recently taken down the link to the TrustPilot reviews. You can still see them here though. (The graphic on their website is from where they purchased 6,000 TrustPilot reviews years ago.) As of this writing, the average is 4.1 stars.
Google Reviews (real)
A company can choose to show (or hide) its Google reviews. When I did business with Legacy Box (I use that term loosely!), Google showed a rating of 2.6 stars across thousands of reviews. Meanwhile, most of its competitors show up in the 4.5 – 5.0 star range. At some point in the last year, Legacy Box reviews are no longer visible on Google. You can still leave a review, you just can’t view the others. There are no Google reviews on Legacy Box.
Yelp Reviews (real)
Surprise! There are no Legacy Box reviews on Yelp either. The company has paid money to remove itself entirely from any search results on Yelp. A year ago, the average on Yelp was well under 3.0 stars. Since then, they have vanished, not wanting any attention on their poor customer service. Go ahead and search any terms you want on Yelp, you will not find them. Meanwhile, most of their competitors are over 4.5 stars.
Facebook Reviews (real)
See the image below. Legacy Box received so much hate on Facebook that the company has literally deleted (or hidden) their Facebook page from the public. They had over 137,000 followers at the time, many of whom had turned against them. Go ahead and search for Legacy Box on Facebook. You will find several dozen random angry customers, but you will not find their Facebook page.
Sitejabber Reviews (very real)
This is where it gets interesting, because Legacy Box reviews cannot be hidden on Sitejabber. So this is where the truth comes out. These are several hundred atrocious reviews from real customers, mixed in with a couple of hundred fake reviews written years ago by Legacy Box. You can tell this because when you sort by date, there are zero positive reviews in the last nine months. Which means Legacy Box hasn’t populated the site with fake reviews in nearly a year! I guess it was easier to hide all the reviews from Google, Yelp, and Facebook!
All of my reviews on the main page of this site were pulled straight from Sitejabber, in the order they were presented to me. Again, these are real people who were pissed off enough to take the time to fill out the Sitejabber form. Several hundred real people, as it turns out.
Amazon Reviews (very real)
2.6 stars out of five is pretty bad. But there are only 50 reviews out there. Usually a 2.6 rating would get you thrown off the platform entirely. But because it’s supposedly a service and not a physical product, they are allowed to remain. This Amazon page covering Legacy Box reviews is worth checking out.
PissedConsumer (very real)
Granted, this site is biased downward (just look at the name). So 1.6 stars out of five is actually doing better than a few of the other company reviews listed on PissedConsumer.com. But I encourage you to read the comments!
YouTube (very real)
I can’t list all of the “I hate Legacy Box” videos here. Just watch this one.
Deceptive Pricing Tactics
Legacy Box reviews suffer because MANY people are deceived by their pricing schemes. You will find a 50% sale on their website literally EVERY DAY of the year. While I like to think that people aren’t that stupid to fall for it, and not read the small print, the truth is the average American believes what they see.
People don’t read the details, and most of the prices are charged at the end. So once they have your card on file, it’s too late. Sure some people dispute the hidden charges through their financial institutions, but most grit their teeth and write a bad review. Or just let it go completely. Legacy Box still keeps your money.
Let’s cover some costs WITH all the hidden costs included.
Is It Really 50% Off?
This is the worst advertising tactic possible, and yet people fall for it. 50% off of $2 million is still $1 million. The lowest third of the population doesn’t read any farther than that before doing business. You really need to dive into their small print before you realize that Legacy Box is actually far more expensive than most competitors, once the final bill arrives.
Also, the 50% off only applies to processing costs! Not any of the other costs listed below. Those will be at full, gouge-your-eyeballs-out pricing. They do not disclose this in their marketing. See the paragraphs below, but I’m talking about flash drives, DVDs, insurance costs, rush shipping, customization, storage fees, cloud costs, etc. They make more money on the add-on bullshit than they do with the actual processing.
Is It Really $7 per VHS tape?
No honey. It’s not. Nor is it $14 per tape. The average videotape order at Legacy Box is well over $20 per tape, once you add up everything. And that’s IF you package everything correctly, and submit exactly the quantities that your box calls for. If you don’t, they will tack on even more charges, for not packing your box according to your order form. This is known as the “additional items fee.”
What About Customized Orders?
Think about it. EVERY set of memories in the country has at least some customization to it. Groupings of photos, titles of VHS tapes, folder systems, etc. Maybe it’s multiple flash drives or DVD sets with organization structures contained within. Do you really think Legacy Box wants to customize anything? There are very few orders at Legacy Box that avoid “customization fees.” Large orders usually have an extra $79.99 tacked on. Medium orders usually have $39.99 added. It is all on their website, but few people read the fine print.
You Are Buying A Cardboard Box
You are not buying a service. I know I hammered this point home earlier. But it needs to be mentioned again in a conversation about their deceptive pricing. This will be the most expensive cardboard box you will ever purchase. Read all the Legacy Box reviews out there and you’ll see how thrilled people are about now owning a worthless cardboard box.
File Format Charges
If you don’t want your files in their standard format, you have to pay even more to get them converted to your chosen format. And these charges are not cheap! Legacy Box claims to be a professional transfer service, but they do not offer any conversions to PNG, BMP, AVI, TIFF, etc. This is in contrast to other companies who do have the ability to do this.
Lack of Customization
Legacy Box may eventually give you back your memories, but they never give you anything usable. On even a fairly simple order, they don’t do any of the following: Cropping, image orientation, sharpening, color correction, custom naming by folders, a digital folder system. These very basic essentials are done by nearly every other serious competitor, but not by Legacy Box. If you have 5,000 photos, two things will happen at Legacy Box. 1) You will pay over $1 per photo, over more than $5,000 total, and 2) those 5,000 photos will be numbered 1 – 5,000. That’s it. All those custom groups you painstakingly created before the order will be completely ignored. They will come back in no particular order, even if you specified the order up front.
Insurance Costs
They literally put this in their buy flow funnel! “Insure your box for up to $1,000 of damages if the box is lost or destroyed”. And even better “Additional 30-day on site backup”. Are you kidding me?
This is an additional cost! EVERY OTHER COMPANY includes this in their standard pricing! It’s an extra $20 on every order with Legacy Box.
Storage Fees
Yes, Legacy Box charges storage fees. If you are going to be out of the country twelve weeks after they supposedly start your order, there is no free way to tell them to hang onto the order until you get back. You don’t want a box sitting on your front porch for seven days. Most companies will honor this and send back to you only when they know you are home. Not Legacy Box! You pay through the nose for storage, assuming you can even get someone on the phone. Or you take your chances with your box sitting on your unguarded porch for seven days.
You Pay Shipping Both Ways
One of the bigger complaints when reading the Legacy Box reviews is that customers pay shipping both ways. It’s standard in the industry that return shipping is free to the customer above a certain point (usually $100-200 per order will qualify for free return shipping). But not at Legacy Box! They get you coming in with the overpriced cardboard box – shipping to them is built into that cost. And then they get you on the back end when the final bill comes.
Cloud Costs
If you choose cloud delivery, you pay through the nose at Legacy Box. For a hypothetical 20-item order, a backup kept on Legacy Box servers costs $40 PER YEAR. Recognize that the vast majority of Google Drive, iCloud, and Dropbox customers pay less than that for annual backup of their entire computer! All of their files cost less to backup than a 20-item order at Legacy Box. For comparison, Memory Fortress charges a one-time cloud delivery fee of $10, no matter how large the order might be. More importantly, Memory Fortress backs up all your data FOREVER, FOR FREE.
Rush Shipping
Legacy Box reviews absolutely rip them to shreds for this one. The industry standard has always been a 1-2 week turnaround time. There is rarely reason to need more time than that. But, remember that you pay Legacy Box upfront on Day 1. They have no incentive to do anything after that. Standard shipping is 8-12 weeks at Legacy Box. Once again, I said 8-12 WEEKS, not days. But wait! If you are willing to get gouged for $40 extra, “expedited shipping” is an option, with a 3-4 weeks turnaround time. And if getting royally screwed is your cup of tea, “rush shipping” is 10-business day turnaround and an extra $80 with Legacy Box.
Now, remember that every other company does this in 10 business days anyway, for no extra charge. If you want your stuff back before you die of old age, you will pay them an extra $80 to get off their asses and do their job.
I could go on about excessive costs and other hidden fees, but you get the idea. Do your homework, read the fine print, then avoid the idiots at Legacy Box like the plague.
Lack of Quality
The Legacy Box reviews listed on the front page of this website tell a better story than I ever could here. After the wait of 8-12 weeks, after the surprise inflated invoice at the end … one would expect that the work would be stellar. Um, I hate to disappoint you, but Legacy Box is by far the worst in the industry in terms of quality. I’m keeping this section short. Go read the reviews about quality. Then, go read the reviews from companies who actually take the time to do a good job.
What’s The Point Of Pointing Out All These Flaws?
It’s really simple. The digitization industry is similar to Wall Street in many ways. It’s a service industry where exceptional service is MANDATORY. When you are talking about the only copy of lifetime’s worth of memories, you simply cannot screw it up. There is no room for failure, or even partial success. The problems with Legacy Box is that it’s an 800-pound gorilla in an industry full of smaller players. So when they screw up (which is the norm for Legacy Box), the reputation of the entire industry takes a big hit, not just Legacy Box. All digitization companies lose in this scenario, not just Legacy Box.
Becasue of the one-time nature of the purchase, the bad reputation is slower to make the rounds. 90% of customers in the US cannot name a single company in this industry. If the one name they know is Legacy Box, they assume the entire industry is crooked too. So they sit on their memories and do not digitize them.
I’m Done Ranting
I tried not to ramble too much. Please share this article as far and wide as you can. Link to it from your website. Mention it on your Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest. I’m just a customer who got ripped off. I don’t want the same thing to happen to you.
We digitize everything right here at our facility in metro Atlanta, processed by US citizens.