Folders, pencils, binders, scissors, pens, and notebooks. All are items found on yearly supply lists given out to students at the start of each school year, but they have faded away over time. Instead, the age of buying supplies online has emerged.

School supply lists are something of the past now, and they generally disappear in high school due to the sheer variety of courses that most high schools offer, which generally provide their own supplies to students. Back-to-school shopping is not really “in” anymore, especially in a digital era. There is no more need to fumble through dozens of binders looking for a specific size or look for certain kinds of pen and pencil: now, all that a student needs to do is look up what they need and buy it.

“For my back-to-school shopping, I shop online. It’s easier because everything you need is on one website: Amazon,” freshman Niya Patel said.

COVID is partly to blame for this, as the shutdown of stores in 2020 caused a lot of people to turn to online vendors to complete their school supply needs. Sites like Amazon and eBay surged in popularity during quarantine, and many people satiated their supply needs online, a trend that has persisted into a post-COVID world. Many students order from Amazon regularly; mostly for personal use, but occasionally for school as well.

“I reuse supplies from past years due to them not being needed as much, but order new supplies online when I need to,” junior Fenil Patel said.

Additionally, most courses have their work and lectures posted online, so physical notes and notebooks are largely things of the past and will continue to disappear in the future. Nowadays, a laptop and a WiFi connection is all that is needed to complete homework and notes, and students have been taking advantage of this convenience. Some students, however, still prefer the feel of classic pen and paper.

“[Paperowrk] allows me to have a physical view of what I’m working with and gives less of a chance that I’d be distracted from other things,” senior Baron Plumlee said.

However, the virtualization of schoolwork may not necessarily be a bad thing, as some will say. Many students feel like taking notes online saves time and energy, and also allows for easier accessibility of information, which is something that was previously unheard of a decade ago, at least for high school students.

In a sense, the disappearance of back-to-school shopping is similar to how email replaced sending physical letters, which helped dramatically speed up communications across the world. Online shopping is slowly taking over the world, one click at a time, which has led to the closure of many in-person storefronts and malls.

“Anything I thought was too expensive given what product it is, I shop in store to find better deals,” Patel said.