I was trying to figure out which place -- Snapfish or Shutterfly -- would give me cheaper prints. I remembered seeing low prices on Snapfish in the past only to be hammered by ridiculously exorbitant shipping prices. Now, apparently they partner with stores like Walmart, Walgreens, Target, and CVS, but the in-store pickup prices are also really high. But you can't go to the site and get a straight answer on how much it would cost to actually buy and get possession of say 50 or 100 prints. Same with Shutterfly.
So I tried googling to figure out which one is better. There are lots of sites that provide comparisons in terms of quality, and some even suggest that Snapfish is generally cheaper, but none of these sites tells you exactly what either one charges. Of course both Shutterfly and Snapfish run "specials" all the time, so perhaps you can't blame the websites for not try to track the constantly changing prices. But those "specials" never give you a clear sense of what your total price will be, and as far as I can tell, there's no website out there that even tries to tell you what should be a good deal on prints, including shipping.
Wikipedia to the rescue. Turns out that BOTH of them were bought by the same private equity firm --Apollo Global Management. Here's the exact sentence from Wikipedia: "On June 10, 2019, Apollo Global Management announced that it would acquire both Snapfish and its rival Shutterfly in separate deals valued at around $3 billion in total."
Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapfish
So that's just one more space -- on top of trailer parks, hospitals, patents and probably just about eveything else -- where private equity has sensed an opportunity to extract money and is driving up prices.
Update 5/10/23: I just learned that the Mars Family (Mars, Inc.) owns veterinary businesses Banfield and VCA, which I had assumed were in competition as well.
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