00:00Hi, my name is Dr. Larissa Damietz and I am an Associate Clinical Professor at the Department
00:06of Hospitality and Tourism Management at Purdue University.
00:11Back to school shoppers are expecting to see an increase in prices.
00:16Around 78% of the population who are looking to spend money on back to school shopping
00:21are expecting to see this increase in price.
00:23Those shoppers are now indeed seeing that price because we're seeing around a 14.5% increase
00:31from 2025 to 2026.
00:35We've seen an increase in spending from year to year and part of the reason why we see this
00:41in fluctuation from 2025 to 2026 is because of increased prices, the need to purchase larger
00:51ticket items such as headphones or tablet and finally the last reason which is to buy some
00:58of the more fun items such as colored pencils and things like that.
01:02But our main driver which represents at least 60% of the increase in spending comes from
01:08higher prices.
01:09prices.
01:10And where we're seeing most of those expenditures coming is from electronics and heavier purchase
01:19items as well as just general price increases.
01:24We're not seeing things such as purchasing of multiple things.
01:28We're not seeing people buying different types of supplies.
01:32We're seeing the same basket of supplies being bought from year to year, just prices are higher.
01:39And interestingly, people are responding to this.
01:43So people are now being incredibly thrifty in how they're looking about purchasing things.
01:49They're going from store to store to store which was very different a couple of years ago.
01:53And so what they're doing is they're very conscientious of prices and they are looking to bargain hunt.
02:00And as a result, the big box stores are looking very much at competing aggressively with each
02:07other.
02:07And as a result, we're seeing to some extent somewhat deflated prices with some of those
02:16almost like door buster type of purchases.
02:20And we're seeing those in some of the more basic supplies.
02:25But really, we're seeing prices overall increase, again, in those larger categories.
02:31Customers are also now looking at using more pay-as-you-go or buy-now, pay-later type of
02:39plans to address some of these increased prices.
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