The back-to-school season is here, and a growing number of early summer sales from the likes of Amazon, Walmart, and Target are changing when and how shoppers purchase their fall essentials.
“I think that Prime Day and the associated sales and discounts from other retailers around Prime Day are being used as a kickoff for back to school,” Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, told Retail Brew.
This is pulling back-to-school spending forward, he said, as parents take advantage of bargains offered at mid-July sales events such as Target Circle Week and Walmart Deals, which have emerged as brick-and-mortar retailers’ answer to Prime Day.
Getting a headstart: This shift in spending is already evident in early survey data. A report from the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics found that 55% of shoppers, as of early July, have already started making purchases for the upcoming school year. Data from JLL showed an even more dramatic shift in spending, with 75.3% of parents on track to start back-to-school shopping by July.
“Families and students are eager to get a jumpstart on their shopping for the start of the school year,” Katherine Cullen, NRF’s VP of industry and consumer insights, said in a statement. “Retailers have anticipated this early demand and are well positioned to offer a variety of products at competitive prices.”
Branding overlap: Nikki Baird, VP of strategy at retail software solution provider Aptos, said that back to school provides a stronger justification for this new crop of summer promotional events around Prime Day.
“I think actually being able to kind of attach itself to back to school is beneficial for sustaining a reason for the season,” she said. “If you can attach a real shopping event from the consumer’s mindset to something that otherwise was just, ‘We’re going to have a big sale in the middle of July,’ then that kind of gives it more stability and more legs.”
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The big picture: But it’s not clear if this merger of summer retail trends will contribute to an overall bump in sales. Saunders said the pull forward in sales is “useful in terms of generating some quick demand, but it doesn’t necessarily generate more demand because it simply means those people won’t buy the products later on in the season.”
Competing industry data speaks to some of this uncertainty. JLL’s survey found that parents plan to spend 21.8% more per child on back-to-school spending at an average of $475, up from $390 per child in 2023, while NRF found that parents will spend $15 less in total this year, down from last year’s record of $890.07 per family.
- The trade group said last year’s watermark spending was due to the majority of shoppers investing heavily in electronics, which are items that typically last for several years and could lead to less demand this year.
Baird said the JLL and NRF predictions were “worlds apart,” but that she ultimately falls on the more cautious side: “I would have to come down more on the side of NFT. I just don’t think this is going to be a blowout back-to-school shopping season.”
She added that inflation “definitely still dominates, even though we’re starting to see those numbers soften.” Indeed, a new survey from Deloitte looking at back-to-school spending found that 73% of shoppers are still concerned about prices.
To combat these perceptions and take full advantage of the summer sales season, Baird encouraged retailers to focus on how they can better “support” parents during this often stressful time of year. That means going beyond discounts and promotions and engaging with them emotionally by creating positive in-store experiences, such as “having the store staff on hand, making sure that the aisles are clear, and that you can handle family shopping,” she said.