USA TODAY International Edition
Get on the bus for back-to-school deals
With coupons in hand, savvy parents say price is always key to shopping
When Kristi Westphal-Thomas goes back-to-school shopping for her two children, she is on a mission.
“Price has always been and will always be the main goal,” says Westphal-Thomas, who is raising a 15-yearold son and 13-year-old daughter in Waynesville, North Carolina.
When they headed to a shopping center two weeks ago, “we knew where all the shops were so we don’t get sidetracked,” she says. “I had all the deals and coupons in hand. My mom taught me to be a savvy shopper, and I really hope that’s what I’m instilling in my children.”
Kids might want the hottest pair of sneakers or the latest iPad Mini. But to parents holding the purse strings, price often matters most when shopping for back to school.
When deciding on places to shop, 69% of parents with kids in kindergar
ten through 12th grade said sales and discounts were key, according to a new survey from consultancy Deloitte. Among respondents, 57% said competitive prices were a top motivator.
“Price still wins as the number one thing people are looking for regarding back to school or back to college,” says Rod Sides, Deloitte’s retail leader, adding that despite the industry’s fixation on creating hard-to-resist in-store experiences “it goes back to the fundamentals. ‘Can I find the product I’m looking for at a competitive price?’ ”
Overall, back-to-school spending for kids K-12 is projected to inch up 1.8%, this year, topping out at $27.8 billion, or an average of $519 per student.
Families sending kids off to college are expected to spend $25.1 billion overall, or $1,362 per student, according to a separate Deloitte survey. And parents are willing to foot much of the tab, with 8 out of 10 saying their kids likely will chip in less than half of the money going toward college expenses.
Many parents apparently are taking a pass on potential conveniences such as the premade kits of markers, paper and other school supplies sold by some parent-teacher associations and companies. Only 21% of parents with children in grades K-12 intended to purchase the packages designed to offer the ease of one-stop shopping.
An informal USA TODAY study last year found that the kits can be nearly twice what it costs to buy each item on its own if families scour for deals.
Sides noted that the curated dorm room collections marketed to families sending kids off to college have drawn a similarly lackluster response, and the muted interest may be about more than price.
“You’d (expect) from a convenience perspective, if you have working moms and dads, they’d take advantage, yet we haven’t seen it take off,” he says.
Jennifer Lewis, who has a 15-year-old son in high school and a 20-year-old daughter in college, says that convenience is now what is most important to her, though that was not always the case. “We used to live in a large Florida city,” says Lewis, who is now in Franklin, North Carolina. “It was all about saving money (on) school shopping. Cost of living was high, and we were constantly looking for deals, coupons and waiting for tax-free weekends to shop.”
But “we now live in a small, rural, North Carolina town,” says Lewis, who also participates in shopping trips with the two families for whom she works as a nanny. “Cost of living is half of what it was in Florida . ... Now we can afford to do less bargain shopping. Convenience is now the key.”
And while Rita Tino Longo says that convenience and price both mattered when she was picking up school supplies for her daughters, now 22 and 19, there is something she’s cherishing even more as she prepares for her 17year-old son to eventually leave home.
“I was sad when my daughter said, ‘It’s fine Mom, I ordered it online,’ ” says Longo, who lives in Rye, New York, and called the annual back-toschool excursions a rite of passage. “So when my son is ready to go shopping for college, I will relish the time with him.”