Walmart and Target are celebrating the fact that American families can barely afford pencils.
I am sitting at the kitchen table on a Tuesday night in mid-August with a school-supply list for Eva, who starts kindergarten in September. The list is two pages. It asks for 24 No. 2 pencils, a box of 24 crayons, two pink erasers, two black-and-white composition notebooks, a pair of scissors, ten glue sticks, a box of tissues, a bottle of hand sanitizer, and a backpack. I priced it out at three retailers. The cheapest path runs about $42. The most expensive runs about $78. Both numbers fit inside the “back-to-school budget” line on our household spreadsheet — the line item that did not exist when my parents sent my brother Jake and me to St. Stanislaus in 2001. My father carried the school-supply receipt home from ACME, two miles from the rectory, and my mother put the crayons in a brown paper bag with our names on it in pencil. The bag was not a category in a financial spreadsheet. The bag was a Saturday morning.
The National Retail Federation says back-to-school and back-to-college spending will hit a record of nearly $147 billion this year, and the paper that reported it ran the story as a price story: Walmart and Target racing each other to the bottom on pencils because the consumer is, in the words of Walmart CEO John Furner, in a “softer” environment than it was in February. Walmart’s U.S. CEO David Guggina bragged about a list of 14 key school-supply items priced below 2019 — crayons for 25 cents, No. 2 pencils for 92 cents. Target says it has held or cut prices on 95 percent of its school-supply goods. The lunch basket is the tell: Walmart is selling ten “high-protein” kid lunches for under $2 a serving in its new back-to-school basket. That is not a retail innovation. That is a company pricing a child’s weekday lunch below the cost of a fast-food value meal, and the fact that it is the news means the families buying it cannot afford the lunch.
A record $147 billion is not families spending freely. It is families paying more in total while the retailers race to sell them less for less. The “softer consumer environment” is the language of a man watching his customers run out of money. This is not “fantastic investments in price.” This is the market responding to families who cannot pay, and the retailers are not doing anyone a favor — they are responding to a squeeze their pricing strategies have done nothing to relieve. Walmart has spent months using tariff refunds for price cuts — the same company, the same squeeze, now dragging into the school season. The race to the bottom is not generosity. It is the ceiling. It is what an economy that has stopped paying its parents looks like from the inventory aisle — and Walmart’s weakest sales growth in six years tells the same story from the other side of the register.
Pew has been measuring this since before some of these kids could vote, and the line keeps going the same direction: majorities of millennials, in survey after survey, report it is harder to feel financially secure than their parents were at the same age. The Hamilton Project at Brookings has run the numbers on what it actually costs to put a child through school in America — supplies, fees, technology, the after-school care the school day does not cover — and the housing-plus-childcare burden has been climbing past the point working families can carry it without help. None of this is new. The same story could have been written in any August since 2014 and the math would have looked approximately the same. What is new this August is that the price story is no longer hiding the income story. The retailers are selling the cheapest pencils in a generation because that is what the median household can carry. The race to the bottom is the budget constraint expressed in inventory.
The structural actor is the federal policy environment that has spent fifteen years declining to make putting kids through school affordable — paid leave that exists in every other rich country, universal pre-K that the House passed in 2021 and the Senate walked away from, a Child Tax Credit expansion in 2021 that briefly cut child poverty before it was allowed to expire, and a federal minimum wage frozen at $7.25 since 2009 that has lost roughly a third of its real value. Tolentino’s line in Trick Mirror — that athleisure is “reliably comfortable and supportive in a world that is not” — names the register. The cheap crayon is the athleisure of school supplies. It feels like a discount. It is the price of a country that has decided not to pay its parents.
I want to be clear about where I sit in this. Our household can absorb the $42 list, and we are absorbing it, because Eva’s kindergarten is at a public school and because my husband’s grandmother’s estate made the down payment on the Fishtown rowhouse and because my parents did three children through St. Stanislaus on a single postal supervisor’s income and that kind of arithmetic — single income, three kids, paid-off house, parochial school — does not exist for the household David and I are running in 2026. The pencil budget is doable because the structural supports underneath the pencil budget are partially intact. For families without the grandmother’s estate, without the dual income, without the public-school option, the 25-cent crayon is the entire budget.
Catholic Social Teaching has a vocabulary for this that the secular policy frame does not. Pope Francis in Fratelli Tutti: “Some people are born into economically stable families, receive a fine education, grow up well nourished, or naturally possess great talent. They will certainly not need a proactive state; they need only claim their freedom. Yet the same rule clearly does not apply to a disabled person, to someone born in dire poverty, to those lacking a good education and with little access to adequate health care. If a society is governed primarily by the criteria of market freedom and efficiency, there is no place for such persons, and fraternity will remain just another vague ideal.” The pencil budget is the market-criteria criterion at the smallest visible scale. The race to the bottom on children’s school supplies is what market freedom and efficiency look like when they are the only operating principle. The answer is not nicer pencils. The answer is the proactive state the Pope names — paid leave, universal pre-K, a Child Tax Credit that does not lapse, a minimum wage that matches the rent.
My grandmothers would have called this a corporal work of mercy — to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry — and they would have recognized that the parish did it because the state would not. The school-supply list from St. Stanislaus was a thing my parents could afford without thinking about it. That is the inheritance that has been unwritten. The deal was supposed to be: you work, you send your kids to school, the basics cost what they cost and you can cover them. Now the national economic story is the price of a pencil, and the people selling the pencils are the ones telling you it’s fine.
This is the season when American care infrastructure announces its mission statement, and the mission statement is Taylor Swift’s title line: you’re on your own, kid. The back-to-school aisle is where you are most alone — the parent at the shelf doing the math on 25-cent crayons while the economy that was supposed to make this easy tells you the record spending is a sign everything is fine. The friendship bracelets in the song are the redemptive turn — the only safety net being the lateral one. The other mothers in my group text who texted me the cheap Target brand comparison last week, who will run the school-supply list together again in August of 2027 when Ben starts kindergarten and the spreadsheet gets one more line item — those are the bracelets. The bracelets hold. They are not a policy.
The fix is not cheaper crayons. The fix is the things that would actually let a family send a kid to school without the spreadsheet: paid leave, childcare that doesn’t cost a second mortgage, a Pell Grant that covers what it used to cover, a school system funded like the one the senator’s kids attend. That is what pro-family policy looks like. A 25-cent crayon is not a policy. It is a confession.