Natalya Piskunova Ruthless shopping: who needs to look for notebooks for the school year 08/30/2024, 08:01

Every year it’s the same: the end of August is marked by the nervous forcing of children and teenagers by strict parents to all sorts of “school fairs”, “discounts until September 1” and other carousels with backpacks and notebooks.

Sometimes it can even be fun – that kind of alternative “quiet hunt” when you are nine years old and tanned, having eaten currants in the country or corn on the beach, find yourself in a wonderfully fragrant kingdom of fresh typographic chemistry of books and covers mixed with paints, pens and pencils. And before you come to the sad realization that you, an adult, are being directed to buy yourself a set of brain torture with bright pictures for the next year, you happily run from shelf to shelf, looking at all these backpacks , first-grader sets and trying to find the most beautiful pencil case and the most cheerful hands, because all this at the end of the holiday still seems like a game.

And then suddenly you turn forty. And you realize that this cheerful mess of uniforms, wonderful smelling books and notebooks with sneakers for physical education are just your childhood memories, and the adult reality is very, very, very different from them. Because all this is actually expensive and tasteless, and even when used very carefully by children, it quickly deteriorates (the great and cruel Sino-Bangladeshi plastic box manufacturer designed it that way to please the marketing gods), and you have to pay for all this. This.

And yet every year, even we tough adults fall into this bright web of preschool excitement.

Is this industrial-scale hunt for pens and notebooks in the last weeks of August really necessary in an era when the market is triumphant? Why, oh why, buy the notorious notebooks in packs and pencils and pens in boxes of 100 pieces? Just because it is “cheap” and “discounted”? Okay, it seems that everyone has stopped falling into the trap of “Black Friday”, when prices increase not fivefold, but only threefold. What makes the excitement before September even more attractive?

In the student age, this “school” excitement lasts for a short time (usually the first three days – a week after the first lessons begin): I remember that on the first days of school we raided a small stationery shop at the institute. After that there was a lull in stationery for three months, or even six months. How this shop managed to survive in this “low season” is still a question. In fact, the salesmen of the stationery shop “made the annual cash register” in three days and immediately went on vacation.

And all because even in semi-adulthood, a reasonable person, even with the help of a flock of pets, will not be able to fill a hundred notebooks with a hundred pens and chew a hundred pencils a week.

There is one modest nuance in sports uniforms for both schoolchildren and students of the first two years – children are growing up. And there is nothing to be done about it: in June, after the last search, a boy on a scooter went out; in September, a two-meter man was found, eternally hungry, under the guise of a first-grader student. The clothing set, of course, is suitable. This means again that the budget allocated for sneakers, T-shirts, shirts, etc. is in minus.

By the way, it is interesting that the “graduation” shopping is not as crazy and ruthless as the pre-September shopping and does not cause such excitement among parents of teenagers and almost students. And graduation clothes last longer; for example, there are known cases when boys’ graduation clothes were transferred to student wardrobes for official events and even survived almost in their original form until the wedding photo shoot. Of course, unlike girls, during university time, we give boys a head start with the annual winter T-shirt-jeans-sweater outfit.

And yes, variety is important in your own notebooks at school and in adolescence, because that’s when all that notorious “observation” and “sense of style” is born (unfortunately, it’s not always innate).

And then all sorts of crazy experiments begin with one’s own style and other forms of searching for one’s external manifestation in the world, one’s idea, one’s awareness. And this means an active search for one’s identity (with regular and guaranteed rewards and losses), an answer to an existentially important question for a teenager (as a “project” for a future adult): who am I? What am I?

And this extremely important and not at all medical process of realizing one’s maturing personality through external attributes cannot be interrupted in any way by marketing cries like “buy 100 lined notebooks – get an eraser as a gift.”

Because every pen is important in understanding and expressing yourself, because the school summer discount ends but the growing person remains.

Moreover, he will be left alone in search of himself, his personality and his identity. All hours of the day and without a break from soup. While enjoying the last warmth and sunshine in the cities, the ability to keep yourself (and your parents) away from crazy sales, to limit yourself to the minimum necessary shopping for the first few days of school is also a great quality. a stable and psychologically stable person. And as you can see, personality is important.

The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.