Most parents doing back-to-school shopping earlier amid cost concerns, fewer buying online

When it comes to back-to-school shopping, Lauren Alongi is not just motivated by price.

The Oceanside resident started shopping in late June for her two kids, ages 3 and 6, so she can search for the best deals, have a good variety of supplies from which to choose and be finished early, she said.

“And then I can enjoy the rest of the summer without having to think about getting school supplies,” Alongi, 40, said Tuesday morning after buying the bulk of her kids’ school supplies, including crayons, scissors, markers and glue sticks, at a DII Deals & Discounts store in North Bellmore.

The back-to-school shopping period is stretching across more of the summer, as the majority of parents with school-age children started buying by early July because of affordability concerns, retail experts said.

Shoppers are trying to manage the whole cost of getting ready for the school year, rather than just focusing on the prices of individual items, experts said.

“And everybody’s talking about more than pencils now. It’s the whole cost of getting ready: lunches, laptops, dorm rooms,” said Stephanie Carls, retail insights expert at RetailMeNot, an online provider of coupons and money-saving tips, in an email.

Also contributing to the timing shift are large retailers, such as Walmart and Target, rolling out their annual big promotions in late June instead of July, retail experts said.

This year, 62% of parents started back-to-school shopping by early July, according to a survey of 7,677 consumers conducted by the National Retail Federation, a Washington, D.C.-based trade group. That is down slightly from the 67% who had started by the same period last year, but significantly higher than the 55% in 2024, the NRF said.

By early June, 32% had started shopping, up from 26% in 2025 and 22% in 2024, the NRF said.

U.S. back-to-school spending this year is projected to total $36.1 billion, a solid increase of 5.9% from $34.2 billion last year, due in part to inflation-related price hikes and resilient household spending capacity, helped by higher tax refunds this year, according to Coresight Research, a Manhattan-based retail analysis provider.

But while 90% of consumers said they will spend the same amount or more this back-to-school season, they expect to buy fewer items due to higher overall prices, including for gasoline, Coresight reported.

More shoppers are starting their back-to-school buying earlier, but fewer are finished by August, according to the NRF.

“They’re waiting on the best deals. They are trying to figure out how their shopping list fits within their budget,” Allison Zeller, NRF’s vice president of industry and consumer insights, told retail professionals, journalists and others during a webinar Tuesday.

Bethpage resident Monique Brown, 29, a mother of five children, bought school supplies, including crayons, colored pencils and glue, for two of her school-age kids, 10 and 11, Monday afternoon at a Walmart in Farmingdale.

She usually waits until the week before school starts to shop, but she changed her strategy this year because of price concerns, she said. “I’m like, prices will go up closer and closer to the time of school starting,” she said.

Retailers launch deals earlier

Back-to-school shopping is one of the largest retail events of the year.

Big-box retailers stand to gain the most, with discounter Walmart leading the pack as price remains the major factor in consumers’ buying decisions, Coresight said.

While 59% of shoppers plan to shop at Walmart for back-to-school supplies this year, 39% plan to shop at Target and 38% will buy from Amazon, according to Coresight surveys.

One of the factors pulling back-to-school shopping into an earlier start is retailers launching promotions sooner.

Last year, Amazon Prime Days, Target Circle Deal Days and Walmart Deals started during the second week of July.

This year, “the first big wave hit June 23-26, when Amazon Prime Day, Target Circle Deal Days and Walmart Deals all overlapped, pulling supplies, laptops, backpacks and lunch gear into the summer before a lot of families were even thinking about August,” Carls said.

Furthermore, Walmart announced last week that it was cutting prices on its 14 most-popular school supplies to 2019 prices, and adding more than 1,300 more price rollbacks on school items compared with the number last year. Meanwhile, Target is leaning into style more than price, promoting its recent collaborations with several fashion brands, such as Hollister, for home and dorm décor, and LoveShackFancy, for apparel, accessories and school supplies, Carls said.

“The basics still matter, but kids and college students care what the first-day cart looks like, and Target knows it,” she said.

Large retailers holding their big sale days earlier in the year also affected small stores, said Albert M. Dweck, a buyer/manager at DII, a Coney Island-based, family-owned discounter with 16 stores, including two on Long Island, that sell clothes, home goods and school supplies.

DII's sales of school supplies are up slightly compared with the same period last year, he said.

“The big guys, the Walmarts, the Staples, the Targets, they’re all advertising. And so people are seeing all these and [thinking], ‘Maybe I need to start buying things,’ ” when they see school supplies in other stores, Dweck said.

Back-to-school shoppers are increasingly visiting a variety of stores instead of doing one-stop shopping to stock up, and fewer are shopping online, the NRF said. Compared with last year, online back-to-school shopping declined from 48% to 41% for students in college and from 55% to 50% for students in kindergarten to 12th grade, the NRF reported.

By Tory N. Parrish

tory.parrish@newsday.comToryParrish1

Tory N. Parrish covers retail and small business for Newsday. She has worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Observer-Dispatch in Utica, N.Y.