Back to School Supply Shopping and Why I’m Not Happy With What is Available This Year

School has officially started (Unless you live in my school district. Then It’s been in session for over a month and a half…) and that means stores are starting to phase out back to school stuff for fall. As a childless adult, I can honestly say that, even though I don’t need to shop for children, back to school time is a great time to shop for office supplies. Pens, highlighters, and sticky notes are more plentiful and comes in styles, colors, and qualities that cannot normally be found any other time of the year.

Even though I’m don’t have children, I have friends that do. Whenever back to school stuff is available in stores, I like to look at anything my friends’ children would need as well. I don’t normally buy them anything, but I do enjoy looking at the different styles of folders, notebooks, and pencils targeting children.

This year, I was not really happy with the the things I saw available to purchase this year.

There are multiple reasons for this, but the main reasons are the change in the economy and the style, or aesthetics, of what is available.

I normally shop at multiple stores, but in the past one store in a specific location usually had what I wanted. In order to save time and energy, I decided to focus my shopping at that specific store. This year, I didn’t find much to purchase. There sticky notes, notebooks, and pens, but nothing I knew I could normally use. Normally, there are pens that write in blue or black ink but have fun colors or designs. This year there weren’t any. The type of notebooks I normally buy were hard to find, but when I did find them not many were in stock. I originally thought this was because the notebooks I wanted were popular, but that wasn’t the case. There just weren’t many notebooks sent to the store! As for the sticky notes, there were some, but, like the notebooks, there weren’t many to purchase.

After pondering on this, I believe the reason this happened is because of the economy. The economy were I live is sometimes hard to figure out because since there are new people in the area. They’re shopping habits are different than the ones I’m familiar with, so I can’t tell if nobody has money to buy things or if there are too many people in the area that shop elsewhere. Still, I think the store I was shopping at pulled back on the type of things I would normally shop for in favor of other things, such as more college items. Also, I wonder if they are trying to aim towards a different demographic of people than the ones who would by the things I’m looking for.

As for the style of the items available, I didn’t like them. Even though I don’t have children, I remember what I liked as a girl and what my friends’ children like. The store I shopped at didn’t have anything they or I would like. There was a few notebooks that would be an alternative to the type of things we’d like, but that’s about it. Searching Target and Walmart’s websites for more selections turned up very little as well.

I’m very disappointed by this year’s selection of items. Since I really like browsing the back to school section, I felt really let down by what the stores had to offer. I also feel like they are more interested in going viral and stocking their shelves with items targeting Tiktok influencers. Unfortunately, these things are not what my friends or I am looking to buy.

Even though I didn’t buy anything from the back to school section this year, I still found whatever I was looking for in the office supply section. I’m just a little disappointed the pens don’t look as fun and whimsical as their predecessors!

That’s all for now! Thank you for reading!

Featured Image’s stock photograph is by Tamra Bellis on Unsplash.com. Edited for this post by me.