I never met a sale I didn’t like. The Battle Cry of the Parsont Clan is, “It’s On Sale!” Wilma Flintstone and Betty Rubble could “Charge It,” all day because they’d be left flapping in my wake. And why, you ask, should you care?
I plan on buying enough school supplies for our kids—for the rest of their natural lives. One time, one trip, and we’re through.
Let’s start with pencils. While certainly not a big ticket item, we always seem to run low on pencils and not always the pencils. It’s the darn erasers. Everyone knows that the pencil and eraser have to wear down at the same time. It’s like having a piece of hamburger without a bun or vanilla ice cream and you’ve run out of chocolate syrup.
Say we go through 10 pencils a month which includes breakage, pilferage, loaning and some actual studying. Broken points and snapped pencils account for five or so per month. Children might actually study eight out of nine months in a normal school cycle. We’ll figure 80 to 100 pencils per year. Buy ‘em.
Can’t have enough notebooks. Seven or eight periods per day, one or two notebooks per class, so that’s 14 per month if you draw, doodle, pass notes, make paper airplanes and the triangular paper football ubiquitous to scores of youth from Baby Boom to Millenial. Add them to the list.
I’m going to fill a room with pens and pads, paper, glue, tape, staples, staplers, book covers, lunchboxes. Then I’m going to buy snacks with a shelf life longer than the average lifespan of a Galapagos turtle.
I’ll save hundreds, no thousands of dollars in supplies over the course of my children’s education. We’ll stop worrying about saving for college.
We can sell overstocked goods to other parents on Craigslist, E-bay and Amazon at reduced rates. Riches may very well be in our grasp.
Sure, there might be some gaps in my logic or grasp of reality. I do work as a massage therapist. A Rockefeller, I’m not. My wife might not agree with the idea of storing enough school supplies to avoid the apocalypse. We’re tight in the house right now.
I’m not quite sure where we’d store the stuff. My wife already wants my office back to separate the kids before puberty sets in and we have World War Z+.
It would probably take more than one visit to a store to get everything I need. I’m not one of those mega-coupon people either.
On the other hand, I could rent a trailer and put it in the back yard.