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Back to School, Not Back to Broke
Cost-cutting Ideas for School Supplies
By April E. Clark
The NRF confirms this spending partnership trend, reporting that roughly one in three consumers (37.7 percent) with children ages 6 to 17 years old said that their kids planned to use their own money for back-to-school shopping in 2002. According to the NRF survey, on average, those children planned to spend $131 on back-to-school items – an addition of almost one-third to their parents' total household back-to-school budgets.
"When parents gear up for school, they know they're in for a financial tug-of-war with their children," says Tracy Mullin, NRF president and CEO. "But it appears that for many families, especially lower-income ones, the retail back-to-school season offers a particularly attractive combination of savings, strategic sales tax holidays (in many states) and fresh fall options to please kids – and their wallets."
Nancy Peterson, of Carmel, Ind., a mother of 11-year-old twin girls and one 10-year-old boy, finds that post-holiday sales and promotions throughout the year make the return to classes less of a burden on her family's pocketbook. "I like to go back-to-school shopping the week after the Fourth of July, when the stores first set up the back-to-school displays and the ads come out in the papers," she says. "If you wait until the middle of August, everything is picked over. I always buy summer clothes right after the Fourth of July and winter clothes right after Christmas. Everything is marked down."