School is in, and I am once again aghast at the heavy loads that schoolkids have to carry each day. For the past few years we have tried to alleviate the problem by purchasing an extra set of textbooks to keep at home. This saves my son the lugging of books back and forth, and eliminates the 'I left my textbook at school' excuse. School textbooks are outrageously expensive - more than $200.00 for the Religion textbook ( I have my own not-so-nice take on that) and more than $100.00 a piece for math, science, social studies textbooks. We don't pay directly for textbooks, (they are supplied by the school ) but we pay alright.Tuition is quite a tidy. So, to furnish the duplicate sets, we turned to Ebay. We've been Ebay junkies for a few years now - car parts, sunglasses, cell phone accessories, spare camera batteries, books, shoes to name just a few things. The school books were a revelation: Social Studies text, $11.00; English text - $4.00; Spanish text - $2.00. One year we got his summer reading books for a penny each. A penny!
Last year ( for the 6th grade) I bought a really great Sharper Image rolling backpack at Marshall's. It was just sitting there at the store. Not another one like it. Forty bucks. Lands End or JanSport would have set me back $80.00 and up. Like everything at Marshall's, its hit or miss. You see an item you want, and the price is good, you grab it. You might change your mind later - but that's what returns are for. I hate Macy's and other large department stores. I'm not much for malls either. Then again, being in garment manufacturing and knowing what it really cost to make things - I try my best to avoid paying retail. That basically leaves me with the discounters like Marshall's, TJMaxx, Loehman's Century 21, and their ilk. They aren't really discounters. They are just ripping you off to a lesser degree. Am I that jaded? Maybe. An old English lady once told me: the price of anything is what people will pay for it. I remember when my son was born there was a nonsensical toy called Furby (a cross between a Gremlin and an owl ) It sold for $60.00. Outrageous, but nothing compared to the 'Tickle Me Elmo' that was going for as much as $1000.00 on the black market. Another inane toy. But, back to that backpack.
This backpack was superbly designed, sturdy, and looked set to make it through the 7th grade, until the straps unexpectedly broke - meaning that my son could not haul it onto his back to climb the 3 flights of stairs to his classroom. We started the hunt for a new bag on Ebay, but click by click we found ourselves in a maze of online stores.We were hit by such a dizzying array of brands, colors and configurations that we quit in exhaustion. An exact replacement of the beloved Sharper Image backpack would cost $80.00 and was on back order everywhere we checked. We weren't feeling that. Then we had a truly original idea. Could we repair the backpack? We scrounged around the house for nylon webbing and found some on an old ratty backpack, which we cut off and fed through the plastic clips. In two-twos we were operational again. It was obscenely easy, why didn't we think of it first?
When I was a child, our parents would have performed this whole dance in reverse - buying new only when repair was impossible, or perhaps just limping along with the broken item, making the best of what was left, and even developing an affection for its new idiosyncracies. We had a car. If you could call it that. It was an English station wagon called a Hillman Hunter. Old as the hills. Handed down from my aunt to my father if you must know the truth. When we hit a pothole, the Hillman (dubbed 'Betsy') would shake violently from side to side (the result of a shot suspension). Steering Betsy got a little dicey when she started with her little shimmey, but we quickly discovered that when we hit another pothole, the shaking stopped. It was like a magic trick that delighted us over and over again. Hit a pothole Dad! Shake and shimmey, mind the ditch, the oncoming traffic! (Somehow it never resulted in disaster) Now let's hit another! We had a similar adventurous (you could even say positive) attitude toward bumps on the head and bodily injuries. The first comment was usually 'You're lucky! Could have been worse'. That was repair. Whether it was a broken backpack, car, appendage or even marriage. How times have changed.
Photo: Tandem bike riders - Madison Ave, NYC ( 9/17/10)
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