Wake County Public School System and Prestige Portraits

Our kid is going into his senior year at high school, and as part of the yearbook process someone really special must have been put in charge. 

Now, I support educational institutions, don't get me wrong. But like Homeowners Associations and local town boards, schools get corrupt mainly due to the neglect. The yearbook process is to me an indication of just how ugly it can become.

Take, for instance, the decision to take senior portrait photos in the summer prior to the senior school year. Kids are still growing, so their pictures look like junior year photos. They are also coming and going to different schools, so there has got to be a lot of coordination, and probably a lot of mistakes made in getting them into the right yearbook.

Then again, there are the printed instructions on the mail-in proof sets:

Choose 2 poses for YB. Yux/Drape pose only on moonlight blue b/grnd and any casual pose that's not full body. NO HORIZONTALS.

These instructions would be clear, except that the mailed package includes only one sticker for choosing a yearbook pose. "Ah," you think, "I can go on-line to select the portraits there!" But no, the on-line guidance is virtually non-existent. It says cryptically, to chose a "favorite" pose, and a "yearbook" pose. Once the yearbook pose is chosen, it is fixed... there is no option to make a change, so watch out if, oops, you chose wrong. Then again, what if you mail in a selected proof too? Sounds like whoever designed this process was an amateur shooting from the hip.

So, OK, all that could be forgiven if they were a startup still figuring it out, or a value-oriented operation. But Prestige Studios has had its hooks into our school systems for years and makes 1300 percent more profit from the smallest photo print ($65 for two 5x8's vs a $5 typical cost for a photo quality print = 13 times) . That is by definition price gauging by a monopoly. 

Then there is the conflicting interests of the yearbook photos with the advertising of the photo sitting packages. The yearbook can only have two photos (at most), so paying extra for lots of additional shots is worth very little. The parents pay the sitting fee for the shots, then find out later that the photo packages run way out of line with customary and usual portrait fees, well into the hundreds of dollars. It is a formal bait and hook operation, advocated by the school system itself.