School Family

Marketing-wise, back-to-school is the new Christmas.  Have you noticed the circulars in that papers these days?  Every store and every brand is trying to get in on the B2S craze.  (Of course, some of our very most favorite brands help sponsor our back-toschool efforts here at schoolfamily.com, but that’s another story entirely. :-)) 

Gary Brown, a columnist from upstate New York, does a nice job of pointing out the absurdity of some of the press releases that come around this season.  Now, I’m all for marketing during the back-to-school season, but it’s not necessary to make these outlandish claims as to why your product is a back-to-school must-have.  

Love it, for example, when Gary points out the “computer cable organizer” trying to position themselves as a B2S must-have.  C’mon guys! Backpack?  Yes. New school shoes? Check.  But computer cable organizers?  Pretty sure I need those (or not) equally in February and May as I do in August. 

Between squeezing in some late beach runs and getting the supplies we do actually need, I think my computer wires may remain a helpless tangle for at least a few more weeks.

Good column from Atlanta from a dad who doesn’t miss the annual scramble now that his youngest is off to college. It *is* amazing how none of the supply goodies you can get for free (pens from the hotel or conference, backpack from the camp give-away, etc.) are ever actually the right supplies for school.  Must be a conspiracy….  Where do all those mechanical pencils disappear to anyway?  Must be in that same secret compartment with all the single socks that go missing.

When my 14-year-old started talking about the style of backpack she wants for school this year, I felt that buying it for her would be aiding and abetting the destruction of her posture. The backpack was
perfectly fine—it’s the combined weight of the books it will be holding that has me seriously considering homeschooling my children just so they’ll never have to leave the house with 75 pounds of textbooks on their backs.

The American Academy of Pediatrics says backpacks shouldn’t exceed 10 percent of the student’s weight. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that last year, my daughter’s backpack weighed more than she did by 10 percent. I’d be thrilled if she’d agree to a backpack on wheels, but those haven’t been acceptable since she was a 4th grader and all the girls towed their books down the hallways like tiny flight attendants. People have always been willing to sacrifice comfort for fashion, but overloaded backpacks on growing bodies aren’t just uncomfortable, they’re a health risk. There has to be a way for kids to study at home without paying for it with lifelong back pain.

Argh! They got me. I swore I wouldn’t be sucked into the back-to-school shopping hype until the first day was clearly in sight. But then I saw an ad for 10-cent notebooks.

Just one dime for 70 spiral-bound pages! I just knew the offer would be gone by Aug. 27 (which, in my town, is the day before school begins and which, if past years are any indicator, is when I would have started my back-to-school shopping).

My personal weakness for notebooks propelled me to the store, where across the aisle I spotted boxes of 24-count crayons for 20 cents each. Now, if I took all of the barely used crayons in my home and laid them end to end, they would circle the earth seven times. Yet at 20 cents for 24 crayons (that’s less than a penny each!), I felt it would be irresponsible not to buy a couple of boxes. Then I spotted the glue sticks….

I prefer to delay back-to-school shopping until the last possible moment. If a school supply enters my thoughts before the end of August, I lose my ability to sustain the illusion that summer will last forever. When a school-related television commercial comes on, I mute the sound and pick up a book. On Sundays, I pull open the newspaper, scoop out the stacks of flyers, and dump them into the recycling bin. But despite all of my precautions, that ad for the 10-cent notebooks slipped through. I’m already feeling the chilly fall air.

School starts here in three weeks, and the back-to-school advertising blitz is in full force. My neighborhood big-box retailer has long since converted its seasonal section into a smorgasbord of spiral notebooks.

In Georgia, we mark the occasion with a sales tax holiday about a week before classes start. Stressed-out parents and fussy kids crowd the stores, under pressure to get everything on their lists before time runs out. It’s a lot like the mall a week before Christmas.

One year, I braved the outlet malls during the sales tax holiday. Around the millionth time I was elbowed by a stranger in a shoe store, I vowed never to do it again. When I pick up school supplies for a donation drive this year, I’ll make an early morning trip to the office supply store to avoid the crowds.

What’s your shopping strategy? Do you hit the big sales, or do you stay home and buy everything online? Wait till the last minute to load up on filler paper or maintain a constant stockpile of No. 2 pencils?

Each school year, it seems more and more kids head off to school toting cell phones. I imagine the old school pay phone (20 years later, I can still remember the calling card code I used daily!) will soon be going
the way of the dinosaur.

So of course, we’ve covered the trend with this piece on kids’ cell phone buying tips. I also found this video from the New York Times technology expert (these guys are always following our lead—it’s getting tiresome) pretty good. Good to see that the phone companies are coming up with just-for-kids phones so that we parents can benefit from the safety and convenience elements while still guarding against the always-plugged-in temptations that abound these days.