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Posted by Mommy Woobie on May 30th, 2008 in Baby Basics

Ok, we just got home from the mall and the whole place is teeming with moms! I half-expected the bookstores to be full with the arrival of the new school year, and sure enough the books were on aisle showcases, raincoats are on various maniquins, even the umbrellas were strewn across the floors unattended!

The usual suspects are there (i.e. Moms and their kids, with the surly looking dads patiently carrying tons of baggages), turning things over and over looking for damages, rummaging through layers of school uniforms and coloring books.

The Filipino way of buying school things is amusing. One example is notebook buying. The spring bound notebooks are cheaper than the ones that arent bound with the nasty looking metal springs. Pinoy moms still buy the cheaper ones, then some colorful strings with which to tie the notebook leaves together (when they remove the tetanus-friendly metal springs). If you compute the difference between the cheaper notebooks and the more expensive ones,
and THEN factor in the amount you pay for the string plus your effort, they’re almost the same price!

Another thing is ballpens. Some moms and their kids test pens incessantly, writing out long, long texts in scratch papers just TESTING the pens. Then, they complain to the saleslady that most of the pens don’t write anymore. Is it maybe the pens lost all their ink with the hundreds of moms who test them out the same way every time? lol.

The supermarket isn’t an exception. Though, one can tell that most of the moms there are those with just-about-to-start-school kids. Everywhere you look are labels saying “Great for School Lunch! (Baon, in Filipino)”. Oatmeals and breakfast stuff are piled on carts, lunch boxes are swept from the shelves for inspection, and even new cooking wares specifically made for frying these lunch food are suddenly out-of-stock with the high demand!

The cashier lines were loooong, I tell you! I was telling my hubby while we were paying for the stuff we bought, “Hun, the next time we buy your school supplies (he’s studying Health Care for going abroad), we might as well buy over the net if we waited this long to panic buy. There are also stuff on sale there.”

My advice: never go to the mall during “Kid’s seasons”, particularly at the start of the school year. But then again, I say that to myself every year during the end of May, and I still end up going because of the……. you guessed it…. SALE!