Julie Witczak had done her best to stay out of temptation’s reach this summer. The Deerfield teacher has been the waterfront director for a YMCA camp in northern Wisconsin, far from the colorful displays of highlighters and spiral notebooks that have sprouted like dandelions in stores for more than a month now.
But when she and a friend had a day off, they found themselves in the aisles of a huge discount store in a nearby town, and it was there that Witczak broke a vow to herself not to score any school supplies until Aug. 1.
“I tried to get through the aisles, but I couldn’t resist seeing the Crayola markers for only 89 cents a box,” she said. “I had to have some. I broke my promise. I gave in before August.”
She’s not alone. As sales of school supplies keep climbing a lot faster than the U.S. population, it’s pretty obvious that parents and other adults can’t resist building their own stash of Flairs, scissors and glue sticks.
For former teacher Gloria Schor Andersen, who ran for Congress in Illinois’ 13th District in 2004, the appeal is “the brand-newness.”
“Some women like to shop for clothes, some like to shop for shoes,” she said. “Show me some color-coated paper clips, and I get excited.”
Ask Andersen what supplies she’s partial to, and she’ll give you a list.
“Roller-ball pens — the point-5 ones — brightly colored index cards, binder clips any size and the piece de resistance, index tabs, especially the 3M color-coded page markers.”
And don’t forget the markers.
“The greatest surprise this year,” noted the back-to-school shopping analyst, “is the $10 sets of many-colored Sharpies.”
When Q caught up with Andersen, she was up to her ears — and, perhaps, file cabinets — in moving from Naperville to New Jersey, with a stopover in Cleveland so she and her husband could drop off their son for his studies at Case Western’s law school. Naturally, the move was color-coded as well.
“There’s a practical side to my craziness,” she said. “You figure, even if I go crazy, I’m maybe spending $100 tops at Office Depot. It’s cheaper than if I was a shopaholic for clothes or shoes.”
When her husband was told he could telecommute to his new job, she told his co-workers, “I’m his office manager. I will have his office set up by 8 o’clock in the evening.” She didn’t have to buy anything except a phone.
Lucia Capacchione, art therapist and author of “Recovering Your Inner Child,” among other works, says nostalgia is at work here, but the rise of activities such as scrapbooking, journaling and arts and crafts are a clue to what else is going on.
“Because of the whole advent of computers, we’ve gotten away from using pens and pencils, felt tips and crayons,” she said. “We’re wanting something more hands-on. As we’ve gotten more technology, a counter-movement to do all this hands-on stuff suddenly emerged.”
She said she sees the sensory power of these instruments in her own seminars and workshops.
“When I bring out the crayons and felt-tip pens and blank paper, people say, ‘This is really great. I’ve always loved these kinds of supplies, but wasn’t sure whether I should buy them.’ The memories they have — smelling the crayons, or just tearing the paper off the crayon when it starts to get worn down.”
School supplies are definitely a whiff of nostalgia, said Karen Ley of Plainfield, who now buys supplies for son Carl, 12, and daughter Katie, 10.
“Remember the smell of freshly sharpened pencils and of ditto paper? The purple ink, and the weird smell that came from the toner?” she reminisced.
But the sensory experience of new school supplies has changed, she said.
“School just doesn’t smell the same. No more chalk or paste or ditto sheets. Now it’s dry-erase markers and glue sticks. At least the pink erasers smell the same.”
Permission to shop
The way Ley sees it, the annual ritual of filling her kids’ back-to-school checklists at the stores is “a license to shop.” Of course, so is the fact that she recently went back to school for nursing and had to stock up for herself at the college bookstore.
“It was great,” she said. “I bought the best pens and mechanical pencils. I bought a $50 backpack with wheels.”
She certainly married appropriately. Her husband, Hubert, grew up in Germany, where his uncle owned a paper factory.
Although many of the supplies that children needed were provided by the schools, he remembers “going to the factory and using the machines to cut our own paper. We always had the fancy stuff.”
Karen Ley doesn’t have access to a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility but said a modern innovation now ranks at the top of her supply list, ahead of ditto paper and large jars of paste that she and friends used to fill in the crevices in the middle of their rulers.
“Highlighters, retractable and erasable. But those mysteriously vanished,” she said, arching a suspicious eyebrow at her daughter.
Naturally, Katie claimed that her mothers’ tastes didn’t line up with her own.
“I only like the really cool stuff, like frog erasers,” she said.
Other mothers say they have heard those alibis before.
“They steal my colored pencils,” protested Ann Jonas of Chicago, who happens to work in leasing at a mall, a dangerous place for a woman with a 6-year-old and a 13-year-old. “They have buckets of them, but they want Mom’s.”
Growing up, Jonas said her favorite school supply was “the crayons with the sharpener — the 64-crayon box — because those had just come out.”
She said she buys school supplies for her kids, 13 and 6, throughout the summer as she sees sales. But she doesn’t stick to the supply list.
“If I go into an Office Depot and see something really cool or different, I’ll pick it up.”
Crayola recently launched its “Total Tools” product line, full of products promising to be cool and different. And although Total Tools product manager Ben Taylor says the company’s target market is kids, it found another area of interest when it was testing its Ultimate Cutter, a product that you hold like a pencil but that cuts circles or shapes from the inside of a page.
“Scrapbooking moms were saying, ‘When will this be on the market? When can I get it?'”
But the interest in school supplies isn’t limited to Baby Boomer or Gen X parents. Eva Mikos of Chicago, an analyst for a local non-profit organization, graduated from college 18 months ago but is still amazed when she sees the new wave of supplies in stores.
“They have so many things I didn’t think I needed,” she said.
Wistful about crayons
Even in her early 20s, she’s already nostalgic for crayons.
“Strictly Crayola,” she affirmed. “No other brand would suffice. Even though they were more expensive, I always made my mom buy those.”
She has cut back from the 64-count variety to the “basic eight,” she said. She usually leaves the crayons for her nieces and nephews when they visit her mom. She says she doesn’t have much use for them, but buys them for their aroma.
“It smells like school; it smells like kindergarten. I remember walking into the classroom, and it’s the smell that brings it back.”
Kari Miller of Aurora is only three years removed from a college campus as well but recently found herself wistfully eyeing the back-to-school inserts in the Sunday paper. She thought about how, “just a few years ago, I really could’ve used that butterfly chair or that mini-fridge because no dorm room would be complete without one.”
In the end, she couldn’t resist a few smaller purchases at a Target store: pens, Post-It notes and a new notebook.
Like other adults, she said she hoped the purchases would provide some extra motivation on the job, just as August shopping trips used to get her looking forward to school. Habits, she said, are hard to break.
“For more than 18 years of my life, it was part of the routine in August to go back-to-school shopping, so I feel like that’s what I should do. But rather than being ‘back-to-school’ items, I thought of them more as ‘get-back-to-work’ items.”
Patti Roberts, executive director of the Downtown Naperville Alliance, says the appeal of such supplies is universal. She says she and her co-workers get excited when supplies are running low at the office.
“When we know office supplies are going to be ordered, we take a quick look through the catalog to see what we can justify ordering,” she said.
“It may just be some new fluorescent Post-it notes or colored folders — it’s sad, but it does give us a thrill. A cheap thrill at that.”
But ordering new supplies does come with a bonus, she adds. A bonus that a kindergartner might not understand.
“We then look forward to the visit by the UPS man — and the summer uniforms just put the icing on the cake.”
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That’s a lot of crayons
As manufacturers up the ante with supplies that go far beyond the standard-issue erasers, crayons and loose-leaf paper, sales of school and office supplies are growing quicker than townhouses in a booming suburb.
* Crayola, the 104-year-old private company that has branched far afield from its base of “sticks” (crayons, markers and pens), had the best back-to-school sales in its history in 2006, and 2007 is looking even better, said spokeswoman Susan Tucker.
* In office superstores such as Staples, Office Depot and Office Max, the back-to-school months (July through September) showed a 17 percent sales increase in school supplies from 2005 to 2006, according to Perry James, office supplies director for the NPD Group. Those months, he added, are growing at a faster rate than the nine other months, and the back-to-school period “is becoming more important to the retailer’s annual sales.”
* Barnes Reports, which measures the sales of office products in all U.S. outlets (including online and mail order) states that sales of “office and school supplies” rose from $14.98 billion in 2004 to $16.61 billion in 2006, a 10 percent increase. Sales are projected to reach $18.83 billion in 2008, a leap of another 13 percent.
— P.K.
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pkampert@tribune.com
