School Supplies For The Stingy
Knock precious twonies of your back-to-school bill
MELISSA HIEBERT STAFF
With tuition fees being so expensive and prices of textbooks soaring, no one needs to add another couple hundred bucks onto the bill by buying school supplies. Here are a few ways to save a couple of bucks in order to have some money for beer and the other things that really help you make it through the semester.
Notebooks
There is so much paper waste on campus that it is almost unbelievable. Just think of all the discarded 20-page handouts from profs that you neglected to read, countless syllabi, and those stupid flyers that people putting on socials always hand out (only to have them crumpled and thrown away once you’re out of their sight). However, this can work to your advantage as usually only one side of the paper is printed on. Just go around and collect sheets from the recycling bins, grab something a little stiffer for the cover (I suggest a cereal box, perhaps Lucky Charms) and bind it together with string. If the cover starts to tear, simply wrap it in a massive amount of duct tape or its transparent cousin, packing tape. Of course, you can be a little more creative and jazz up the cover with a collage or something like that. The coolest cover of a notebook that I’ve seen was made out of two of those really old floppy discs of an Atari. Much cooler than those boring, mass-produced Hilroy scribblers, anyway.
Pens and Pencils
You don’t need to go out and buy a bunch of pens and pencils every single year just because you want fresh and shiny school supplies to start off the term. Chances are you have at least a dozen old pens and pencils kicking around from last year, because really, who uses a pencil until it is worn down to the nub, or a pen until it completely runs out of ink? Most often, old, functioning writing utensils get tossed aside so you have an excuse to buy a brand new package of multi-coloured uniballs. On the off chance that you in fact don’t have any ballpoints laying around, I have taken the liberty of collecting all of the forgotten pen and pencil rejects in my house (over a hundred) and putting them into a container on my desk at the Manitoban office for public consumption. So please, stop on by and grab a few. (No jokes! I’m sort of curious to see how many people will actually come by and take some. Yes, I am a loser and this is my pathetic idea of fun.) Backpacks Buying a brand new backpack every year is pointless. Most backpacks you will encounter at the mall or elsewhere are endowed with a zipper that will probably conk out on you halfway through the semester anyway. You might as well go to a thrift store and buy a used one for five bucks rather than spending $60 on a new one just because it doesn’t have “Sarah + Mitchell = 4EVER” scribbled on it with a Sharpie. Also, army surplus has an abundance of used canvas backpacks for fairly cheap. Not only are canvass backpacks ever so hip and lend themselves nicely to patches, buttons, and other custom designs, but they also tend to be sturdier and last longer than regular backpacks. (And if they do rip, they are easier to sew back together.) Also, they usually have buckles, which will last longer than zippers as they tend to break easily when you try to cram five classes worth of textbooks in your backpack.
