Saving on clothing, splurging on tech: the new reality of post-pandemic back-to-school shopping

Going back to school is just as stressful as it is costly. To avoid overspending, parents make their shopping lists long in advance. Not surprisingly, the recent global pandemic has made these lists very different compared to 2019.

Shift in categories: parents intend to burn their money on technology

Just recently, the professional services network Deloitte shared the results of their annual survey. The findings revealed a substantial shift in product categories.

40% of parents expect to buy fewer traditional categories by trimming down their spending on clothing by 10% and school supplies by 13%. At the same time, spending on computers and subscriptions is expected to increase by 42%.

“If sprinkle notebooks and chalkboard totes were a thing in 2019, 2020 will be the year of technology. It is obvious that parents will spend their money on e-learning platforms and buy digital devices to support remote schooling,” says Daniel Markuson, digital privacy expert at NordVPN.

NordVPN’s analytics team investigated this trend further to predict what technology parents will consider as must-haves for their kids in 2020.

Top-3 technology purchases for back-to-school shopping:

1) A laptop. Convenient as tablets may be, they do not have a physical keyboard and bigger screen. These features are particularly important when participating in online classes, as materials might be hard to read. Daniel Markuson stresses that laptops in particular will be on the rise also because they were hard to get in the spring. As COVID-19 disrupted the supply chain with its travel restrictions and limited flight capacity, the supply was far from meeting the demand.

2) A VPN subscription. Although kids of this generation are digital natives, they are now given access to tools that were initially created for adults. Hackers might use this for their own advantage. NordVPN’s analysts registered that the number of compromised databases went up by 600 times during the pandemic. We already see a growing interest among parents asking our support team how to keep the VPN connection always on. On the other hand, if kids are invisible to hackers, they are also invisible to their parents. Therefore, adults have to educate their children and monitor what they do online.

3) Workplace productivity tools. Workplace productivity tools will become the new normal for families with internet-native children. As school might become remote again, parents will be using planning tools to help manage their kids' workload.

Unbelievable as this may sound, kids moving to the world of technology means that adults need to adapt their tools for successful online tuition.

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This release was published on openPR.