Jostens Yearbooks scammed Our High School for Years.. : Teachers

Edit #2: This blew up, so I wanted to put at the top if they ever see this: THANK YOU YEARBOOK CREW! Deadline is tomorrow and they are still working as we speak (12:00 AM EST). Your hard work is why it's worth it!

I wrote this as a comment in a post today but I feel like it needs to stand on it's own as well. To start: I don't work for Treering, but this all came out of a post about potentially switching to Treering for yearbooks. I think it's really important to understand how Jostens did the smoke and mirrors routine for years until they finally got caught. Here it goes:

As technology teacher, I took over yearbook advising last year to raise funds for our tech department. Immediately upon taking over I was sent invoices from Jostens in the amount of $5,000. What? How the hell do we OWE for a yearbook that costs $78? Where is the money going? That question led me down the biggest and shadiest rabbit hole I have ever seen. Jostens is literally a scam. First, when asked to send an itemized invoice, Jostens was hesitant. Finally, after persistence, I got it, and low and behold the numbers just didn't add up.

Why? Well first off I had nothing to go off of because we had not signed a contract with them IN THREE YEARS, so I literally could not even refute pieces of any agreement. Secondly, a line item showed up in the top right in small print on our invoice saying "production fee". What was this? Jostens was making us pay $100 FOR THE FIRST 50 BOOKS, AND WE WERE SELLING THEM FOR $55 a piece! That's right; our kids were literally buying books for negative profit. No mention of this in a contract. No mention of this even on the line items in the itemized invoice. Nothing.

So I go down the lines and - oh hey! - we are getting charged $1500 for "advertising materials". Sweet. I never asked for this, you just sent a box of posters. If we made them ourselves it would have cost us maybe $50. But tack on another $1500, awesome.

So I'm already at our wits end by the time the books arrive, and things get even better. I count the books and while we ordered 320, we received 375. Why do we have so many extras? JOSTENS SENT US THEM WITHOUT OUR PERMISSION, AND CHARGED US! They claimed it was for kids who forgot to order them so we could sell them, but if you look at the numbers of books it conveniently brought the small amount of profit we made to zero. They then want you to return the books by a certain date (usually in the summer) for a credit refund. JOSTENS ZEROS YOU OUT WITH EXTRA BOOKS AND HOPES YOU DON'T SEND THEM BACK.

You think that's the end? Oh boy, not even close.

So after months of being pushed around, I made it one of my absolute priorities to get these kids the most money I could back. I nit-picked every little detail, knowing full well that Jostens had no legal ground on things because no contract was signed and our students had paid a lot of money to this shady company. I argued about advertising, I contested them about the extra books, everything. In all, Jostens waived around $5000 in money owed. Think about that for a second. Jostened erased $5,000 at the wave of a wand. If you can magically erase $5,000 out of nowhere, what does that mean for the charge to begin with?

So finally satisfied that I could be rid of the plague that is Jostens for $1,400 , we sent paperwork to our downtown financials to pay our balance and move one. That should be the end of the story right?

Wrong. Downtown gets back to us and notices that JOSTENS IS CHARGING US TAX ON OUR YEARBOOKS. They collected taxes that never existed, to the tune of $1600. So, livid, I send an email to JOSTENS demanding our payment record for the entirety of our relationship with them and find THEY DID THIS FOR FOUR YEARS. This is tax fraud, plain and simple. They claimed that they needed a new tax exempt sheet from us but we never sent it in. They had the old one, which is LITERALLY THE SAME NUMBER as a "new one", but that's what the problem was. They are supposed to be cutting a check to us now for around $6000. Now think about how many schools use Jostens and how many schools they potentially did that to. That's a class action lawsuit in the millions of dollars right there.

My blood pressure is up just writing this. They have basically robbed all of our students for years, and it happens all the time because advisors come and go and rarely have time like I did to catch them and call them on their bullshit.

So we went with Treering this year. First off, I came in with fangs and demands from the get go because I was so pissed off and jaded from Jostens. I started mentioning everything to the guy and listed all my needs in what I wanted contract wise and he was like "yeah our contract is one page long." It's literally one page long (front and back). The next thing I asked was the base price, which came out to $35.62 (140 pages, estimated 300 books sold). JOSTENS BASE PRICE WITH ALL THE HIDDEN FEES WAS $58. They were going to bump it down to $40 (so generous!) when I told them we were firing them.

So our Jostens ones sold for $78, and now we sell them at $60. So that's $18 LESS per book and $25 MORE in fundraising money. We went from owing Jostens $3k last year to raising over $7000 this year.

I love my students and defend them rabidly, and seeing how Jostens treated our school makes me sick. Go do the math on how much Jostens is making on your school and you will be too. I would be upset about any swindling, but public school kids? Our free and reduced kids could never afford even discounted books because prices got out of hand, and all because of shifty tactics and corporate greed.

So on the technical side, Treering is not a big improvement from Jostens software, but I do like the linking with social media and especially Flickr. We post all of our pictures to Flickr for the kids to view, print and share during the year for free, then we can automatically grab from albums and place. The themes are good, a lot to choose from too.

I could go on, and if you want to talk more please PM me, I try to tell anyone that will listen this story because it really is an injustice.

Edit: Admins banned post for "self promotion", so link removed.

Oh man that felt therapeutic getting out!

Edit #1: thank you to u/behemothpanzer for submitting to r/bestof , I have put so many hours into fighting this small battle that no one knew about or cared about and it really means a lot to me to see such support. I also wanted to add that I don't just have problems with Jostens, other yearbook companies have done shady things too and I don't even know them. This was from a post at the bottom of the comments about a yearbook company essentially trying to bribe me:

Another thing I didn't point out is that other companies try to lure you in with free gifts. A company told me they would give me a free $50 gift card just for meeting with them. Like ME a gift card. I'm pretty sure that's illegal, and if not that's immoral as all hell! Greasing teachers with gift cards... unbelievable.

Edit #3: Thank you everyone for reaching out, it means a lot to me. I tried to respond to everyone, and if I missed you I'm sorry I will try tomorrow. It's late hear but I was too pumped about your support! Goodnight and thank you!

Edit #4: In a poetic moment, I went to my school mailbox this morning and found this! Haha