KSL Price Shops Back-to-School Supplies

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — The back-to-school aisle has returned in many supermarkets and discount stores. Doing a little planning can save you a bundle when it comes to school supplies.

The National Retail Federation expects Americans will spend over $27 billion on back-to-school shopping this season.

Like many moms, Aubrey Andrus always goes shopping with her boys to pick out their supplies.

“We have our favorite go-to places, this is where I’m going to. I don’t generally pay attention to sales.” Andrus explained.

Andrus’ friend, Kamie Draxler says she sets limits for her five kids.

“I kind of like to hit some of the weekly sales and get the best things they have at each store,” said Draxler.

Katie Anderson leaves her kids at home when she shops.

“I do price compare all the sales,” Anderson explained. “I do price compare all the sales. I do think you can get some really great deals. I like to watch what’s on sale.”

Like Anderson, KSL price compared supplies from multiple stores and an online retailer in search of the best deals.

With six items on our shopping list, we first visited Walmart, Target, Office Depot and Smith’s Marketplace.

From each, we bought the least expensive glue sticks, pencils, binders, notebooks, scientific calculators and backpacks.

Walmart was by far the easiest on the boss’ credit card, with a total of $16.02. That’s thanks mostly to a $2.77 backpack.

At $36.95, Office Depot was the priciest retailer. Their cheapest backpack was $18.74.

Smith’s Marketplace ($21.66) and Target ($28.83) came in the middle.

In our side-by-side comparison, some items have different counts because not every story carries the exact same package of pencils or glue sticks.

Next, we checked out the dollar stores. They also have back-to-school deals, but as we discovered, may not have everything on your list.

Dollar General did not have a scientific calculator, but the rest of our list priced out at $8.75.

Dollar Tree’s total came to just $5, but they didn’t have backpacks.

Coupon company RetailMeNot found 87 percent of parents surveyed said they were stressed out by back-to-school shopping. To save some shopping stress, we next price checked online retailer Amazon.

Our shopping list priced out at $32.76 on Amazon. Only Office Depot’s total was higher.

But RetailMeNot’s shopping and trends expert, Sara Skirboll, says for those stressed out parents, going online may be worth it.

“They don’t want to deal with the crowd, they don’t want to have to deal with crying kids and saying ‘no’ to when the kids makes all their requests,” Skirboll explained.

Skirboll says if there are some items that you can hold off on buying for a few weeks, great deals can be found after school starts until about halfway through September. She also recommends buying things like highlighters, pencils and notebooks in bulk.

“Go to Sam’s Club, go to Costco,” Skirboll said. “Split the bill with a few other parents in the classroom to save yourself some money.”