By Mariel Howsepian West Dressed
THE NATIONAL RETAIL FEDERATION predicts that, this summer, Americans will spend $20 billion back-to-school shopping. That’s loose change compared to the $470 billion dollars NRF estimates we’ll spend this Christmas.
But back to school is big business. It’s our second biggest shopping season, followed closely by Valentine’s Day at $17 billion. The average American family will spend $594.24 on children’s clothes, and essential supplies like holographic rulers, scented erasers, and turtle-shaped pencil sharpeners.
This year, one out of five families set aside a portion of their economic stimulus check for school shopping. New back-packs. New shoes.
In middle school, my Miley-Cyrus-equivalent was a combination of Mayim Bialik in “Blossom,” and Melissa Joan Hart in the Nickelodeon series “Clarissa Explains It All.” They wore funky hats with silk sunflowers, black leather motorcycle jackets, skirts made of men’s neckties, jean shorts over polka dotted tights, vests, Doc Martens, and dangly earrings. They were mavericks.
Between seventh and eigth grade, my family moved. I got the chance to reinvent myself. I hot-glued a fake flower to a hat, bought black plastic Doc Martens knockoffs from Payless, and begged for a multicolored sweater made of crocheted flowers. Though I was blatantly copying Blossom and Clarissa, I came off as a nonconformist among my conservatively dressed peers.
Now, you can’t turn on the television without seeing the J.C. Penney commercial modeled after “The Breakfast Club,” or the Target commercial in which kids run backwards down a school hallway. Sears’ school shopping slogan: Don’t just go back — arrive.
I teach sixth grade, so these commercials are torture. I don’t want my stayca-tion to end. I know it can’t go on forever, but the commercials are like straight pins to my happy-go-lucky bubble. I, too, will have to go back-to-school shopping.
Sometimes I hear people talking about how the American public school calendar is antiquated, modeled after days when kids helped out on family farms. There’s no need for long summer vacations.
Ah, but there is. It’s called “a consumer-based economy.”
MARIEL HOWSEPIAN digs black coffee, fairy tales and a man in coveralls. She lives in Santa Monica and
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on August 9, 2008. Read the original PDF.