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As summer draws to an almost end, thoughts turn to school and back to school shopping. It can be a bit daunting really, all that purchasing and planning and materials lists and what not. The malls are starting to up the ante a bit as they announce sales and incentives and the insipid tax free weekend.
It always feels like a scam to me - all of it really but especially the tax free weekend during which people are convinced they are getting some major kind of deal when really, it's not such a big deal at all. When shopping for a couple of kids or more, saving 8% isn't all that big of a savings at all when you look at what the average parent purchases for their child for back to school. The other part that feels like a bit of a scam is the peer pressure of it all, "other families are buying back to school clothes, I guess I should too" says the guilt that lives in our mother heads. And whether our kids need it or not, we feel lesser if we don't do it and we feel broke if we do.
Last year we at Future Craft Collective decided to take back to school shopping into our own hands, green it up, and have a mega back to school clothes swap at our kids elementary school. We based it on the Swap a rama rama we had participated in at Maker Faire: seamstresses, silk screeners, swappers and more all gathered together in the school gym to help people modify the random selections they had made from the piles. It was amazing fun and an incredible display of abundance with more than enough of everything for everybody and not a single, solitary penny was spent. All the kids were psyched at getting "new" duds for back to school. All the parents were ecstatic at both getting rid of what they didn't want and gaining what they both wanted and needed while at the same time satisfying the societal urge to gussy up for back to school. And some cool fashion statements were made as various items were silk screened and altered and radified to suit the wearer.
We're doing it again this year and we know it will be bigger and better than before. And the word on the streets is people are psyched! We put a tutorial on our Future Craft Collective website if anyone has an inkling to run their own swap. And we'd LOVE to hear some other ways people have modified the back to school shopping.
