I never understood back to school supplies. I remember going shopping with my Mom and getting pencils and pens, and notebooks and stuff.

But today, shouldn't students just be getting laptops?

Why does the Ti84 still cost $100? It's not color, doesn't play doom and doesn't do any more or less than it did when I was in high school, yet still costs just as much.

Yeah, I'm going to run right out and by my five year old a laptop! LOL! Back to school supplies for the younger set is pretty much the same as a few decades ago. Fat/skinny pencils, crayons, glue, paper, etc.
The only new thing I found on our list was dry erase markers. I believe they are for the teachers. With what they get paid I don't mind helping them out.

"Boarader"?

School supplies don't really change all that much; you've got to hand it to the Pen and pencil companies that they keep trying to pretend that the same ballpoint pen kids used 30 years ago won't work just as well.

@CreativeLinks: A lot of schools are discontinuing their laptop programs, citing the expense of maintenance and replacement, and the level of distraction they cause, and that the integration into lessons showed little or no added value. There was an article about this in the Globe last year. But even if they were as much as or more than these districts hoped for, there will still always be a need for manual methods. I'd be really sad if kids stopped using crayons. They need the tactile stimulation and fine motor development. And God forbid there's an interruption in the power supply. We use too much energy as it is, without making kids wholly dependent on it.

"confused customers," LOL. Every time typical Walmart customer is used in a sentence like that I think of Cletus the Slack Jawed Yokel from the Simpsons.

"Lookey there Mah, dem's some fancy pants- what do I do?"

They must be getting better efficiency from their child labor.

Maybe that should be a Consumerist investigation - the supposed "need" for every kid to have a graphing calculator. Why? Graphing? Graph what? Functions? That's what your paper and pencil are for. Seriously, though, I have the HP 48X somewhere and have never - EVER - used the graph functions. Sure, some of you engineers might, but high school kids? Grade school kids?

I sometimes wonder what kind of perks TI is sending to the school that require these...

@KPFEIF

Man, we had to graph functions all the time in PreCalculus in high school. i can understand them being helpful in Algebra 2 as well, but that stuff is so easy to graph that you really just need graph paper and a pencil. I had to use my TI-85 on a regular basis. We also would make little programs on the calculator that would ask for various components and spit out an answer for you, so that we didnt have to memorize so many equations. That was awesome.

Graphing calculators should never be a requirement prior to Calculus.
Grade school is just crazy.
Other than being a very nice way to demonstrate functions there's little they can add to lower level courses.

As for the price, TI certainly keeps it high because of a lack of competition, but they get the job done and take a reasonable beating for years.

@elf6c: i have heard that some folks will never eat a skunk, but then again some folk'll. :)

as for graphing calcs, i loved my ti-89, in both calculus and calc-based physics, both taken in high school. the graphing funtions were very very very useful. however, i invision teachers at the beginning of the year thinking "ooh we can do all these neat things" but they never get done. thats why they all require them.

I love school supplies! I just bought a 10 pack of those gel pens at Target for $2.49! Sweet! And they are better than those crappy Pilot G2 gel pens that don't write after an hour of using them.

Plus, they come in 10 different colors and have metallic inks!

I'm in heaven! :D

JC "Penney" :)

Wal-Mart can offer all these sales because they only hire part-time employees now. Hooray!

I'll buy my school supplies elsewhere for a few pennies more.

@mefinney: They've also got it spelled wrong in the tags below the article.

When are you Consumerist writers going to start using spell check? Seriously.

School supply list have gone crazy. In NYC it is not uncommon for the lists to include Post-It notes, copy paper, dry erase markers, Sharpies and so much other stuff that should be supplied to the teachers but aren't. While I don't mind as much because I realize it would otherwise come out of the teachers pocket, shouldn't the school be providing the teachers with their supplies?

School supplies have become the new scam. Last year I looked at our list and everything on the list matched to a package that included much more than was needed. IE: they need one color of dry erase pen you can only buy a full pack with 8 colors and an eraser. So instead of 89 cents it is $3.89. I noticed this with a bunch of items that were common on the various school district lists.

Every year our school lists include a few more items for the teacher. The schools need to give them a larger classroom budget. Every year there is also one item that is impossible to get. Last year was the green ball point pen. I went to Kmart, Target, Walmart, Office Max, Staples and the grocery store. NOBODY had green ball point pens. I find out later in the year this item was not even used. Oh, and they have to be seperate pens. You can't send them with one of those cool 4 color big bic pens they had when I was a kid.

I wonder how much cheaper the supplies can be?

Office Depot, Office Max, and Staples have had pretty decent prices on back to school items. I think brand name crayola crayons were 9 cents for a 24 pk last week.

Anyways, those back to school lists are usually pretty dumb and from my own experiences, you don't use half the items anyways. Personally, I wouldn't go out of my way to buy any item (e.g. the green pen like listed above).

" its core business of undercutting competition and instigating price wars."

Why should that upset anyone? I believe it is called capitalism.

@ribex: How would a spell check find "penny" to be in fault?

How about crying poverty and skipping the purchases of school supplies?

My local TV station does this big push for local people to buy supplies at OD, WallyWorld etc for the local schools.

Nice idea. Maybe.

The other day the low income community center had this back to school advisory thingy for parents.

The advise was something to the effect of ..... wait for the TV station program to kick in, you may not have to buy any supplies for your children schooling.

Now one of the richass private school was to receive the donated supplies as well.

I looked over the list from a local HS. Good grief. Big ticket items abound. My gut says some teachers are taking the excess supplies and selling them on Ebay and making more $ than their teaching salaries.