With the average family spending hundreds of dollars on back-to-school supplies, it’s not a wonder that parents are constantly on the lookout for back-to-school bargains. Clothes will often eat a huge chunk of a family’s back-to-school budget every year. School supplies, though, can also eat up a huge chunk of your back-to-school budget. And, if you have multiple classroom and back-to-school supply lists to tackle, it just makes sense to do a little searching around for the cheapest school supplies.
You probably already know that prices on school supplies vary widely from store to store. As is the case with any consumer goods, some stores will have higher prices, on average, on school supplies than other stores. Finding the cheapest school supplies from store to store does take a little legwork sometimes, but knowing where to start at first can hep you save time, money, and frustration.
Let’s take a look at some of the best places to find the cheapest school supplies…
1. Dollar Stores
One of the first places we stop to knock items off of our classroom supply list is the Dollar Tree. Oftentimes, the all for a dollar type stores have LOADS of school supplies, and they’re sometimes the best place to score the cheapest school supplies. Things like pencils, pens, erasers, and even school lunch items are great back-to-school items to snag at the dollar stores.
2. Online Retailers
Once back-to-school time rolls around, nearly every retailer wants a little piece of the back-to-school action! And, that includes online retailers. Before you head out and brave the utter craziness in the stores, check your favorite retailers’s websites first. You can often find the same great sales online as you can in-store, and pick them up at your local store for free. That way you can dodge the crowds but still get the same great deals.
Also, be sure to scout out other online retailers, like Amazon and eBay. Amazon offers lots of great deals on school supplies every day during the back-to-school season, and eBay is a great place to snag fantastic deals on electronics, like laptops and graphing calculators.
3. Wal-Mart
Love it or hate it, Wal-Mart is often the place to go for the cheapest school supplies! The back-to-school aisles at Wal-Mart are packed with school supplies from popular brands, like Elmer’s and Five Star, but there are also lots of quality school supplies from lesser known brands. The generic brands of school supplies are typically just as good as the well-known brands, but with a much lower price tag.
4. Your Own House
What’s better than finding the cheapest school supplies? Finding school supplies that you don’t have to pay for at all! If you do a little digging around your own house, you’ll probably find that you already have some of the school supplies on your classroom lists. I know that I usually have leftover, unused school supplies from the previous year, for instance. You can also raid your crafting supplies for school supplies like scissors, glue, crayons, and markers. Chances are, you also have some other items on your school supply list lying around, like calculators, hand sanitizer, tissues, and plastic bags.
