Back-to-school shopping? Already?
Marketplace
Marketplace
4.6 • 8.6K Ratings
🗓️ 6 July 2026
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
U.S. families expect to spend more than $900 on back-to-school shopping this year, according to one PwC survey. Big box retailers have taken advantage of anxiety about higher costs by pushing school supplies earlier than ever. In this episode, how consumer mood correlates to consumer spending. Plus: Holiday weekend heat strains electric grids, Boeing and Airbus aircraft demand persists, and algae can make or break Great Lakes summer tourism.
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Read the stories in today’s episode:
- Anxiety is driving some of our early back-to-school shopping
- Chicago Fed launches a new consumer sentiment composite index
- Weekend heat wave tests the country's power grid
- What's behind the massive appetite for new Boeing and Airbus planes
- How the algae in Lake Erie can make or break the Great Lakes economy
- How homeownership turned an HR professional into a plant entrepreneur
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | On the program today, we will dabble in the consumer economy. |
| 0:06.0 | We'll do some housing and some energy. |
| 0:08.7 | Also, algae, but not that algae. |
| 0:14.1 | From American public media. |
| 0:16.7 | This is Marketplace. |
| 0:35.7 | In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Rizdahl. It is Monday, today the sixth day of July. Good as it always is to have you along, everybody. |
| 0:40.8 | Well, welcome, everyone, to the first full week of the second half of the year. |
| 0:55.1 | We're going to spend some time up at the top of the program today, not on corporate fortunes for the next six months, not on markets or indicators, but on you and me and everybody else in this economy who buys stuff, consumes stuff, in other words. |
| 1:00.7 | And we're going to do it with an eye on business behavior and our buying patterns, also the calendar. |
| 1:01.9 | Target and Walmart and Amazon and most other retailers are rolling out back-to-school sales |
| 1:06.5 | earlier than usual this year. |
| 1:08.5 | And PWC, once upon a time known as PricewaterhouseC |
| 1:11.2 | says families are going to spend $922 on supplies this year. Forty-seven percent of those families |
| 1:18.1 | say they are going to be spending more this year than last. Marketplace of Kristen Schwab |
| 1:24.0 | gets us going with corporate promotions and consumer predilections. |
| 1:33.1 | During a target run yesterday, Kristen Deal kind of couldn't believe what she saw on display. |
| 1:36.3 | Colored pencils, binders, backpacks. |
| 1:45.3 | I was surprised to see already the back to school when we, you know, I think most of us are just happy that we're just out of school. |
| 1:50.2 | Deal is a marketing professor at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business. And she says sales patterns have shifted over the last handful of years. Everything's |
| 1:55.9 | starting earlier. Christmas promotions before Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving before Halloween and those things. |
| 2:03.1 | It wasn't always this way. Companies first started pushing early buying during the pandemic when broken supply chains threw retail inventory into chaos. |
| 2:12.8 | Consumers seemed happy to shop early and buy more. |
... |
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