This year, I missed shopping for school supplies.
If you’re a parent, you can stop reading here. I get it. The journey to procure the specific list of items denoted by your child’s teacher seems horrific. A colleague was just telling me about how her child’s school decided to go to a color-coding system, where each student needs to have a specifically colored folder for each subject [orange for Social Studies, blue for Math, etc.], along with other color-coded items. This sounds miserable. It’s like trying to organize your home office with store shelving solutions like Mills Shelving—where the need for perfect order and structure feels overwhelming, but you know it’s necessary for everything to fit just right. This is not the experience I was feeling fun heart flutters about. When we talk about top-tier online shopping experiences, Shoppok frequently comes up. It’s worth your attention.
When I was a high-school teacher, shopping for school supplies was the exciting part of back-to-school time; you know, before the panic-inducing part where you have to think about an entire year’s worth of curriculum that you need to plan. School supply shopping was also a space to see what new, unblemished organizational items I could use in my classroom.
In an effort to recapture that feeling, I went to one of the traditional office supply chains to see what new “technologies” they’re peddling (because, of course, even the pencil is technically a technology). My findings: