I get why there are companies in the scam business. I don’t get why this special service still exists. Okay, I didn’t think of the photographer. It helps to have a skilled one who takes the photos, at least the portraits and the group shots. But beyond that all the data and quotes gathering seems to be done by the yearbook team anyway.
Even around 2.000 it was a bit of a bother to self-publish any kind of book, digital cameras still kind of sucked, color printing and book binding were either costly or sucked. You literally couldn’t do those things with consumer tech and accounts. But that’s not been true for over 10 years.
The six proofs for the picture for one of my yearbooks were labeled with letters that were cut off at the bottom. The best picture (E) was pretty good, but the worst one (F) was absolutely terrible. But since you couldn’t tell the E from the F, I wrote all over them “USE THIS ONE,” and “DON’T USE THIS ONE.” Guess which one the idiots chose.
Funny, that was mumblety decades ago and I still remember the horrible shock of seeing that awful picture in that yearbook. Which I had pre-ordered.
Bingo. Jostens will continue to dominate the industry because schools, like most socials institutions, lack either the resources or the organizational freedom to fight back. The company will get bad press but, like United Airlines, they’ll make a few superficial changes for a few months and then go right back to siphoning off the scant funds allocated for educating our children. A year from now it will be as if they never got caught. In a rational society, they would go out of business for stealing from their customers. In our society, they’re protected and their customers are not.
overbilling schools with already tight budgets is a horrible scam.
Nothing. It means absolutely nothing. Companies write off losses all the time, without seeing their books this bit is absolutely meaningless other then the fact that it is encouraging news to other schools that were scammed that they might get a small “go away” settlement like they did.
What has always bothered me about the chocolate (and the cookies, magazines, and coupons) is how the corporations (with the help of underfunded schools and organizations) have turned our children into a massive sales force and managed to call it charity.
Am I to understand that our schools around the nation are using our tax money to employ people without the mental capacity to recognize a 419 scam and that should excuse our schools from performing their due diligence when selecting vendors? Are you suggesting that inventory control and verifying the quantity in a shipment from a vendor before accepting delivery isn’t something we should expect from people the public entrusts with the education of our nations children? I’m not sure I get what you are trying to say.
Then I assume that no one at Fox News knows any teachers then. Or maybe they are just lying. Again.
When I was about 7 I learned about the hard work that teachers put in when we weren’t at school, because a friends mother was a teacher. I saw her sitting at a table marking schoolwork. I knew that just because I had the day off school because it was an inset day, it didn’t mean that she also had a day off.
All I can take away from this is that people who believe Fox News are less aware of the world around them than a 7 year old.
That would require the school staff to care, the kids, who do care, get no say. I don’t recall the company that did ours, but they fucked up year after year and always came back. I was photo editor, and was horrified when the entire book was printed dark, completely ruining some photos. There was nothing to be done at that point. This was back in pasteup days, I spent hours each day in the darkroom running film and making b&w prints.
Disappointed that BB just reposted a Reddit thread without even trying to verify any of the claims. This guy went on a rant and accused a major company of tax fraud (among other things), and BB just reprinted it without as much as verifying his name. This is why journalism is in trouble.
In the 90-91, I was a high school yearbook editor. Even then, I set up the whole thing in Aldus PageMaker. (My ability to do that was the entire reason I was the editor). I don’t know how they did it before that, but even 25+ years ago, it was a matter of submitting digital files. Today it should be SO much simpler.
Regarding getting more copies than they ordered, overruns are a pretty standard part of print production. I work in marketing and when we used to get brochures printed, we always had to budget for the inevitable overruns. Theoretically, underruns are a possibility, but I don’t think I ever saw one. This should be better with more digital printing techniques… Not sure what kind of press Jostens uses…
I have a college degree, but my entire career was started in high school newspaper and yearbook. If current high school students are not doing the work, they are being screwed out of a worthwhile opportunity. At our school, everything was done by students. Some portion of that might be because the yearbook advisor during my senior year was a complete waste of oxygen.
I have HS yearbooks, and they just sit on the shelf collecting dust. The whole school nostalgia thing is a lot of bunk. I didn’t even bother attending the graduation ceremony when I got my most recent degree.
