The Office Is Dead, but Kid Cubicles Are Booming
Remote learning has created a thriving new target market for office supply companies
--
Christy Warner, a communications manager in Minneapolis, searched for months for a desk that fit her teenage daughter’s room and was priced less than $200. “I looked on Ikea, Wayfair, Overstocked, Target, TJ Maxx, everywhere, and everything is sold out,” she says.
Last spring, her daughter, a high school senior, converted the dining room table into a working desk during lockdown. Today, she’s upgraded to a folding table in her bedroom. “I just couldn’t find something,” says Warner. “It’s just like the toilet paper shortage.”
Covid-19 has created a whiplash cycle of unexpected product surges and shortages, from bicycles and pools, to flour and outdoor heaters. The latest unexpected pandemic rush: children’s office supplies. Call it the most expensive back-to-school year yet. As schools continue toggling between remote and hybrid learning, parents have been throttled into spending hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars to set up makeshift home classrooms for their children — from first-graders to marooned college students.
Some companies are cashing in on the boom by launching new products to cater to what’s essentially a new breed of kid’s home office.
Forget backpacks and lunchboxes — according to Wayfair, sales of student desks are up 129%; meanwhile sales of Chromebooks, a popular no-frills laptop for students, have surged in the past few months. “It’s a totally different set of things that are needed for back to school,” says Ben Arnold, a consumer technology analyst at research firm NPD. For instance, sales of notebook computers jumped 46% between July and August, compared to the same time during 2019, according to NPD. There was a similar lift in sales of USB webcams (174%), PC headsets (109%), monitors (78%), computer mice, (70%) routers…
