That’s exactly how I feel about Ticketmaster.
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Here in the U.K. we have yearbooks for the final year, but rings and such? Urgh. A half decent memory and you have plenty of reminders!
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You realize you’re still blaming the people who got scammed, and not the scammers, right?
Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, but the action that is criminal is still the fault of the person committing the crime. Naturally this will fall on deaf libertarian ears because nothing says sociopathy like “a free market with informed consumers will correct the problem!” while lying through their teeth about every aspect of the situation.
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I don’t think so. Yearbooks aren’t a thing in Germany. When we finish high school, we may or may not attend a ceremony in the school’s gym. Though some might actually buy a suit for that.
Our business is printing photos on stuff. Photobooks, T-Shirts, your own greeting cards, postcards from your mobile, posters, calendars, you get the idea. Usually unique items, sometimes people will order a couple, like their own marriage photo books in the best quality and more affordable ones for the guests or the family. I know that photographers - we sponsor a lot of contests and exhibitions there - use products to showcase their work. For smaller print runs, we have acquired other companies specialised for those. They do business cards, brochures, etc.
But that was kinda the point: Nowadays you can handle the creating and ordering part easily on your side, so you don’t really need an intermediary or the service. Unless you want to create a very special and very exceptional layout or design, but that’s also neither our domain or that of companies like Jostens.
Since we print the stuff, we don’t need to hustle into the design process, I guess. Though I think that there are actually Indian companies that do this for you, even using our software directly. (And, astonishingly enough, there’s a reason for “proprietary” ordering software, because that can be keyed to specific machines used in the process. Hardware still determines what software should generate and send.)
What seperates capitalism from late stage capitalism is a tissue-thin veneer of something that white men used to think of as “fairness”, or as “business ethics”. You might be allowed on the capitalist platform if you had the right friends and behaved yourself, even if you werent white or didnt have a dick. But that was a fragile senae of fair play.
“Peak oil” serves as short-hand for a lot of maxxed out markets, and now all of a sudden, being white and being male doesnt confer the advantages it once did. In a lot of places, brown people need to be treated more harshly than before, just to give (some) white folk people to look down on.
TLDR; it was never about fairness.
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When I became my school’s yearbook advisor eight years ago I made the mistake of going with Jostens. They are easy-to-use and helpful, but it is nearly impossible to break even. I did exactly what jhbadger recommended. The next year we made the entire book in Abode InDesign. It is not as easy as he makes it sound: creating a yearbook from scratch with 30 distracted seniors, all while teaching four other classes, is a nightmare, but I’ve survived. (Admittedly, not much gets graded that month before the deadline.) With Jostens, I paid $42 for a 96-page yearbook. Now I pay $32 for a 300-page one.
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I always refused to participate in those. For years, I’d donate a new DVD player to my daughter’s classroom instead. Because this was the mid-late 2000’s and all the classrooms were still using VCRs.
A couple of the teachers at my daughter’s school do this every year. I do think we use a POD service.[quote=“milliefink, post:5, topic:100432, full:true”]
That would take a lot of time on the part of teachers who are already completely out of spare time.
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They used to get parent volunteers to help (they might still do, from the PTO), but they manage to do it none the less. It probably helps that the school is so small. They do an excellent job of getting all of the students in pictures. We can almost always count on seeing our daughter’s smiling (or grumpy) fact at least 3 times, outside of her class pictures. But again, it probably helps that her school is so very small. I can’t imagine that happening for a school of say 1000 students, unless you had an army of parent volunteers or the students doing it themselves.
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BB is not a news outlet.
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I’m curious as to why the BB article’s url contains a piece of bad French sentence. Kinda bugs me.
That’s great and everything. Kudos and all. But here is the simple truth, there are bad vendors out there and a common method to extract more pay by shipping more than was ordered is really very common. This is not a crime as you would have it but rather simply a tactic. Anyone who we entrust with our tax money and who is granted the power to spend those dollars should be competent and perform simple due diligence. Now, paying vendors for unwanted items using tax money seemingly without any care or control seems more like criminal negligence. While you call them victims, to me it seems the taxpayer is the victim and the gross negligence on the part of these schools the actual crime.
quick edit to add that labeling someone a libertarian without any evidence other than your own misunderstanding of that persons position is pretty lame.
The crime is what Jostens did, and the people they did it to is the school. How you get from those basic facts to calling the school the criminals in this case indicates there’s something wrong with your brain, even if it’s not libertarianism.
IANAL so you’ll have to excuse me and remind me what crime Josten committed here? And why are we excusing these schools from performing basic due diligence with our tax dollars? My brain damage is preventing me from understanding why they get a pass on something that will get you fired from a private sector job for incompetence. So please explain how schools don’t have to be careful with our money.
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My daughter’s elementary school was a charter. They had the BEST fundraisers. Everything was about things that the parents would actually want. Their big fundraiser was a school fair that all the kids participated in, it was near Christmas, and they had several “gift making” stations where you could put together things like those hot chocolate cones and such that make good presents for piano teachers and such that parents need to gift to.
What do they use nowadays? I’m willing to bet that even DVD players are obsolete but they still use them.
In my day we didn’t even have VCRs. We used those big rolls of film and overhead projectors. We also didn’t have computers at all, let alone in every classroom.
They probably do still have DVD players, if they don’t have some sort of projector a teacher can hook their laptop to. When we moved to Washington, the school gave every kid a laptop, so I assumed they didn’t need DVD players donated. Our school district in CA was severely underfunded (something like 50% of parents in Pasadena send their kids to a private school) so it’s entirely possible they’re still using those DVD players I gave them.
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Whoa. I can’t really imagine that.
It’s a good thing though, because it puts everyone on the same footing, and also because dicking around with posterboard like we had to is busywork that actually gets in the way of learning.
Is this Washington DC or Washington State?
How are you slipping so easily between incompetence and crime? Not “being careful with money” is not a crime; getting scammed is not a crime. Scamming is, generally, a crime — or, if not a crime, deeply immoral.
I’m making no excuses, at this point, for the school, merely pointing out that the thing you called criminal isn’t, and the thing you are going out of your way to excuse is.
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Please explain what crime is committed by shipping too many books and invoicing for the amount shipped. I really would like to know what your reasoning is.
What you describe as “getting scammed” would seem reasonable if not for this article which explains how this is happening around the nation. It seems to me that schools have a fiduciary responsibility for public funds allocated to the school. If we are talking about a well known bad actor, in this case Jostens, who has operated in a shady way for years and these schools never bothered to do any checking, I would be hard pressed to say these schools upheld their responsibilities to the students and the taxpayer. As I said earlier, if you took delivery of a shipment in the private sector without bothering to verify the contents of the shipment matched the order, you would be fired for incompetence. So why would you or anyone defend these schools for not even bothering to verify what was ordered was what was in a shipment the school accepted delivery of? For that matter, why would anyone defend a school that for years does not bother to check to see if there is a difference in price for the amount ordered and the amount being invoiced? That’s business 101 and if the school administration can’t get that right, how can we trust them with public funds? I’m baffled that they are labeled victims by anyone when it’s clear the only victims are the taxpayer and the student.
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Wow.
I have been advising my high school’s yearbook for the past ten years. Assuming that the poster is from Western Mass, it appears that we work with the same Jostens people. I’ve published six 170-page hardbound books and six 24-page mini-books with them, and my experience has been nothing like what is described here.
I am in no way saying that I know exactly what happened in his case, but Whalen’s accusations are pretty serious, particularly considering that it appears he only advised yearbook for one year. I would’ve assumed that the good people of BoingBoing, a blog that I read regularly, would have at least contacted Jostens for a statement. It’s only fair.
