Today, Tuesday September 10th, 2024, is a very big day.
The US presidential debate is this evening (8:00pm TexTime). Without exaggeration, the following are at stake:
future of the Earth / climate crisis
freedom vs fascism in the US
fate of Ukraine (and by extension, all of Europe)
the freedom of Taiwan
The fate of the planet is literally in the hands of “undecided voters.” How can anyone be undecided at this point?
WLBOTT acknowledges the gravity of today’s debate, but we have bigger fish to fry at our corporate headquarters. Our business cards will arrive today!
Vistaprint
After a thorough vendor review, we selected Vistaprint for our business cards.
In November 2014, the company announced it would reorganize; Vistaprint continued operating under the Vistaprint brand while the parent company rebranded to become Cimpress. As a result of the change, the company’s ticker symbol was changed from VPRT to CMPR.
In August 2018, Vistaprint announced that it would expand its presence in North America with a new facility in Dallas, Texas. This was to be the second manufacturing facility in the United States. Vistaprint planned to have manufacturing fully completed by 2023.
Computer-integrated manufacturing techniques help minimize human intervention and labor costs. Using browser-based desktop publishing environment, customers design and proofread the job. Jobs are routed for printing without intervention. The printing is done in a single pass on automated, high-volume, large-format presses. Once printed, the products are cut down to size using a computerized robotic cutter, assembled, packaged and addressed using proprietary software-driven processes, and shipped to the customer.
In a form of mass customization using as little as 60 seconds of production labor per order versus an hour or more for traditional printers, orders are printed faster and at lower costs than traditional printers. Their strategy is to target small-run orders usually excluded from conventional large printers.
In 2018, a recently married gay couple sued Vistaprint after they received anti-gay pamphlets, “Understanding Temptation: Fight the good fight of the faith”, instead of the wedding programs they had ordered. Vistaprint CEO, Trynka Shineman, said that the wedding programs and the flyers were printed at the same time, and that the wrong shipping label was put on the boxes by a third-party partner. Vistaprint resolved the matter with the couple and the lawsuit was dropped, with an apology to the couple and donations to LGBTQ organizations.
In June 2020, two fundraisers for Black Lives Matter found that their order for Black Lives Matter posters also came with All Lives Matter posters. In an interview with Buzzfeed News the customer said “this felt like very, very clear attempts to undermine our message and undermine the message we’re trying to put out”. A Vistaprint representative said that an internal investigation “found that it was an error in the automated packaging process which combined two separate customer orders.” In response, the customers said that they are skeptical of the explanation, especially since the LGBTQ incident in 2018 made this seem less like a one-off.
