Of School Supplies and Subtle Lies
Of School Supplies and Subtle Lies
A kind friend of mine agreed to an interview with me, as follows:
How did you know when to buy school supplies?
Duh. The calendar. Stores run out if you don’t get what you need by mid-August, like after that you can only find girl’s pencil sharpeners. Usually there’s a lot of other things you can’t find but this year, we went to Wal-Mart — 26 highway miles — because every single year Consumer Reports does a study and Walmart’s prices on school supplies are cheapest, even cheaper than Dollar Store’s prices. They sell smaller amount of things and hope you want notice the difference. Walmart lets you get a bigger amount for a cheaper price, since they buy in bulk. Folders were 15 cents at Walmart and $1 at the Dollar Store. Staples has some really cheap stuff but they balance out their bottom line by charging more for other school supplies. If you are doing all your shopping at one store, the Consumer Report said, Walmart is the cheapest.
Target is not well stocked, around here, at all but they do have more artificial dye-free foods sometimes (I used to be able to find dye-free M&M’s there but those are gone now).
We also bought some new school clothes for the kids since we couldn’t find them at thrift stores. He tried on four pairs and only one of those four worked. We didn’t want pants that didn’t look good, or were priced as much as new clothes from Walmart or Target. So we bought the Walmart clothes — easy, quick, plus school supplies. My daughter loves the jeans we got there, for her because they added super-skinny to their categories of sizes which used to be. In the past we’ve got her a size or two down from her size so the jeans would be skinny enough. We can’t do that anymore due to her height. The thrift stores don’t usually have size zero pants. My son is regular sized.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Homemaide gives you the prices you want without the subversion.
You won’t need to sneak food anywhere you go to avoid Homemaide’s prices.
We won’t bury our price policy in indecipherable term sheets.