Where is cheapest place to buy/order school supplies?

LittleDucky

Thu, Aug 06 2015, 11:18 pm

The absolute cheapest, but most time consuming, is to take your list and each week the deals of the week. Office Depot/Office Max, Staples, Target etc have different things each week on sale so it makes the most sense frugally those items each week and at the and fill in with the last few items... and if you do it regularly and go to many stores you will end up getting almost everything for pennies comparably. Be organized and take your master list and mark how much of each you bought already.

But in general, Staples has a 110% price comparison guarantee. If you can prove that another local store or AMAZON selling for less that week, the Staples will match that price and knock off another 10%. But only for equal items... ie not store brand, different sizes etc.
Print off the ads you want, make a list of what to show and try to be organized.

So it is a lot of work but you can get school supplies really cheaply.
Also, think about what you will need in January. You will need more pencils, pens, filler paper. extra notebooks. Get it now and then save it for next year. Stock up on crayons too! If you use crayons.... why spend $3 a pack when staples has them for 50 cents a pack!?!

Google school supply stock up prices. There are lists out there but I don't know the prices offhand, sorry.

seeker

Fri, Aug 07 2015, 12:10 am

What Little Ducky said, to the word.
I do a variation on that with factoring in how much my time is worth. I don't have any of these stores in my immediate neighborhood so it is definitely not worth hitting every best sale. So I make my personal stock-up price a little higher than the absolute rock bottom, and choose one best time and place to just jump on it and get everything or almost everything at once. So for this year so far it was this week at Staples: They have all-season deals on some of their store brand things (notebooks, folders, etc) - not rock bottom prices like the penny-deals that Office Depot has (or used to? Haven't seen much this year), had some nice advertised deals of their own this week (Crayola WASHABLE markers for 75 cents, people!) and this was a good week for brand name items in other stores' sales too so I saved circulars from other stores onto my iPad and had them price match a whole bunch. I did not get rock bottom prices on everything but I got great prices on lots of things and now have probably more than enough of everything I might need for the year. Except plastic folders, those were still expensive wherever I went. Maybe they'll happen to be on sale when I happen to be passing a Staples.

amother

Blonde

Fri, Aug 07 2015, 12:26 am

I spent the summer following kosheronabudget.com and dailycheapskate.com to find the deals of the week.

(I wrote some of this in another thread)

I put together the list I needed. I compared the "lowest documented price" by those websites and the cost of my items added to $11.23. I put the same items in other stores (not walmart, I dont have one near me so its not practical) and here were my values.

target: $15.75
staples: $16.57
amazon: $21.61
What I actually spent: $12.19