According to the latest Retail Council of Canada (RCC) survey, more than twice as many Canadians are planning to make dedicated back-to-school shopping trips than they did in 2022.

The new insights from the RCC’s back-to-school shopping survey included a randomized sample of approximately 10,000 respondents, using Caddle’s mobile platform and online panel. It found reveals that 66% of Canadian shoppers are making a dedicated trip to purchase school items, versus only 32.7% in 2022.

Additionally, 81% of back-to-school shoppers will shop at brick-and-mortar retailers in their neighbourhood, instead of purchasing their items online, almost double that of 2022 (41%).

RCC found that shoppers are more focused on purchasing lower-priced items thanks to the inflationary environment and even plan to defer purchases of higher-priced items.

According to the RCC survey, 73.6% of Canadian shoppers plan to spend more than $50, compared to 77% who intended to do the same in 2022. The number of people planning to spend less than $50 has gone up by 3.4% compared to last year.

Stationery is expected to be the top spending category (60.8%), a product category that did not make the list in 2022, which was topped instead by apparel. Clothing was in second (32.1%), followed by books and music (23.4%) and electronics (18.2%).

The survey found that 29.5% of respondents plan to make their purchases two to four weeks before the start of school (compared to 42.9% in 2022) and 15.7% will make their purchases one week or less before the start of school. This is a shift from 2021 and 2022, when parents were shopping much earlier because many items were expected to be out of stock due to supply chain issues.

Like last year, big box retailers are the preferred destination for back-to-school shoppers. Those retailers (62.3%) are expected to take the lion’s share of the wallet, followed by clothing (32.1%), department stores (19.5%) and drug stores (18.4%).