It's late August and everywhere there is a sales event going on. People fight for the space to get in/out/around the store and scramble to find what they need. The annual rite of late summer, back-to-school shopping, has begun.
Everywhere you go, you will see children urging their parents to buy the newest products, be it stationaries, shoes, clothes, cell phones (since when are cell phones necessary for students? Of course, I am a dinosaur when it comes to this). The kids will use any method to get their parents to buy what they want — tamper tantrums, loud wailings, yelling uncontrollably, or sit-ins. Usually the parents would submit and make the purchases. Too bad the money is not well spent — the kids will beg for something else sometime around Christmas. Maybe what the parents should do is to create their own cartoon characters and put them on the stationary.
Backpacks have evolved quite a bit since the turn of the century (has it been 5 years already?). Now one can find backpacks that provides cushioning for the back, that are ergonomically-designed, that are made of feather-light materials. Too bad most of them still can't last one year, thanks to the constant rigorous tests kids put them through. Maybe the people designing backpacks should concentrate on making their products more resistant to wear and tear. On another note, I think school buses may soon be a thing of the past — students will travel to and from school using their backpacks (the technology already exists, after all).
A large portion of the money budgeted for back-to-school shopping is spent on clothes and shoes. Many stores are pushing the "trendiest" clothes to the students, saying that the only way they can be cool is to wear their line of clothing. The kids today are quite smart, but many fall for the same trick year after year. After the clothes they bought are no longer trendy, the clothes go to the bottom of the pile, never to be seen again. Maybe parents should do is to guess what would be popular in six months. That way, if children is teased for what they wear, they can respond by saying "this will be popular some time soon, I'm just a little ahead of the curve".
Some believe that the above can be solved by making students wear uniforms. Too bad uniforms can be quite costly too. With the pace of children's growth, what fits the child in August probably won't fit by April. If a child goes to a school that requires its students to wear uniforms, one way to ensure that the child will never grow out of the uniform is to buy one set of every size. Sure, it will cost a lot up front, but it will save money in the long run — if one size no longer fits the child, just have the child wear something one size larger.
For university students, the above may not be all the purchases one needs to make. For them, back-to-school shopping is more like a shopping for things to put in a new home (in many instances, the students ARE moving to a new home). Furniture usually eats up a large portion of a university student's back-to-school budget. However, most of the furniture they bought may be not be theirs for long — witness the piles of furniture in the frontyards of many houses in the vicinity of universities in late April. If someone can create a line of furniture — sofa, desks, bookcases, TV drawers, or even beds — that can be folded flat, that someone WILL bring in a lot of dough. For now, the closest thing we have is inflatable furniture and air mattresses.
With furniture taken care of, the students' focus shift to food. Many stock up on instant food (usually the whole year's supply) at the beginning of the school year. Even if you really like macaroni and chesse, eating it everyday will make you detest the dish sooner or later. If a house is shared by students, maybe they should convert one room into a giant freezer. That way, they can purchase a large amount of meat, frozen vegetables, and ice cream (or milk) and put them in the freezer room. This way, there will be a lot more variety in what they eat.
I can't wait for the first day of school, because the back-to-school madness will start to subside. As for the suggestions I made, take them with a large grain of salt.