Most Clark County schools have already kicked off the 2019-2020 school year, but that doesn’t mean the back-to-school shopping season is over.
“It’s not going to come to a screeching halt,” said Mark Johnson, senior vice president of government affairs for the Washington Retail Association. “The weekend of (Sept.) 7th and 8th is going to be very busy at the malls.”
It’s a rush that retailers are counting on. In an era when headlines often herald the demise of brick-and-mortar retail at the hands of online shopping, the back-to-school season remains a reliable driver of customer traffic, both in Clark County and nationwide.
“It’s still huge for us,” said Jeffery Temple, director of corporate affairs at Fred Meyer.
According to an annual survey conducted by the National Retail Federation, this year 53 percent of parents said they planned to visit a department store for back-to-school shopping, and 50 percent said they would visit a discount store. Online shopping came in third at 49 percent.
Local retailers ready
Fred Meyer sees high back-to-school traffic in all of its markets, Temple said, including Vancouver and Clark County. All of its stores set up special displays for the second half of the summer, usually in time to give parents enough shopping days even if their children’s school starts early.
“It’s almost like a department,” he said. “We set up a whole area where everything is concentrated, usually near the front of the store.”
“Everything” includes all the usual school supplies like backpacks, pencils and notebooks, as well as some electronics like flash drives and other computer accessories. Laptops and other electronics have become a bigger part of the average back-to-school shopping list in recent years, he said, although schools often provide those for students.
“We certainly see how digital is coming into the fold,” Temple said, “but at the same time all those basics are still essential.”
The back-to-school season has always been a big deal for Fred Meyer, he said, and it’s remained strong — so much so that this year the company added a “Teacher Appreciation Wednesdays” discount program, which launched in July.
Evonne Woodard, general manager at Office Depot in Hazel Dell, said the demand for standard school supplies has remained consistent, although one noticeable change in recent years is that schools have tended to provide much more specific lists of items for students.
“It’s definitely much more structured,” she said. “They’re giving brand (names), even.”
But that’s not necessarily a problem for retailers, she added — if anything, it makes it easier to prepare for the back-to-school season, because retail staff can be sure they’re ordering the right items to stock the back-to-school section.
Woodard said she’s also seeing more technology appear on the lists, with some students looking for iPads, Chromebooks or computer accessories.
“This year, even from the first grade up, they need a stylus,” she said.
But that hasn’t pushed any of the basics off the list, she said — folders and composition books still find their way into every shopping basket.
National trends
Nationally, back-to-school shopping is as big as ever, according to data from the National Retail Federation. In July, the organization released the results of its annual back-to-school survey, conduction in partnership with Prosper Insights and Analytics.
Total expected back-to-school spending nationwide was pegged at $26.2 billion. That’s slightly less than the past two years, which the report attributes to fewer households with children in grades K-12.
Expected spending started from a low point of $17.4 billion in 2009, then grew to a peak of $30.3 billion in 2012, according to the federation’s data. Since then, annual spending has ranged from $24.9 billion to $29.5 billion.
However, projected spending per household is actually greater this year.
Families with children in grades K-12 reported that they planned to spend an average of $696.70 on back-to-school supplies, which is the highest per-family spending figure of the past decade, topping the previous record of $688.62 from 2012.
The biggest back-to-school expense for parents of K-12 students is expected to be clothing and accessories, the federation reported, followed by electronics, then shoes, and finally supplies like backpacks and notebooks.
But while electronics are the second-highest driver of back-to-school spending, the data also bears out Temple’s observation that they’re not on everybody’s shopping list.
The results showed that only 54 percent of respondents indicated that they were planning to purchase electronics, compared with more than 90 percent of respondents who indicated that they planned to make purchases in each of the other three categories.
Border county effects
There is one complication that Clark County retailers may face this year, Johnson said. Earlier this year, Washington imposed new restrictions on the sales tax exemption for shoppers from Oregon, and that has the potential to deter Portland shoppers from crossing the river, including for school supplies.
But even before the change, Washington was likely losing some of its own Clark County back-to-school shoppers to Portland stores, Johnson said. That’s part of why the Washington Retail Association has spent several years lobbying for legislation to create a “sales tax holiday” for back-to-school shopping.
The latest legislative effort was 2019’s House Bill 1559, which would have created a sales tax exemption for purchases of clothing items that cost less than $100 and school supply items that cost less than $10. The exemption would only apply during the second full weekend of August each year. Several states including Florida, Virginia, Ohio and New Mexico all have a version of the back-to-school tax holiday.
HB 1559 and earlier Washington sales tax holiday bills all died in committee, which Johnson attributed to fiscal analyses that showed a loss in state sales tax revenue. But Johnson said the Retail Association contends that those analyses ignore the added tax revenue that could be brought in by spur-of-the-moment purchases of non-school items once the tax holiday lures consumers into stores.
