The Ruthless Global Battle for Your Back-to-School Shopping Dollars

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http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/the-ruthless-global-battle-for-your-back-to-school-shopping-dollars/279057/



In a world of cell phones and iPads, there's one back-to-school product both grandparents and children share: lined paper. Whether it's three-hole punched for a binder, perfect-bound into a black-and-white composition journal, or waiting to be torn out of a spiral notebook, lined paper is the medium of schoolwork.

While the products have remained the same, the industries that manufacture and sell paper have been buffeted by the forces of globalization, mechanization, and automation that have transformed nearly every industry.

Domestically, paper and notebook producers like Mead, Norcom, and Top Flight employ about 500 people at factories in small-town Ohio, Georgia, and Tennessee. They used to employ many, many more. In the early 1980s, a single Mead plant in St. Joseph Missouri employed more than 900 people during the peak back-to-school production season.

But very cheap imports combined with retail dynamics in the United States have produced an incredibly competitive marketplace. The school-supply paper market is as seasonal as Halloween costume rentals. And worse, the paper and notebooks are what retailers use as their loss-leader or door busters. The cheaper the notebooks that kids need, the more families come to the store and end up buying the expensive higher-margin stuff that kids want.