24 Nov 2025 · 3 min
John Jonas and Julia discuss back-to-school shopping in the Philippines as students return to in-person classes. Supply shortages hit index cards and uniform fabric, tailors have four-week wait times, and families are buying early after two years of limited purchasing.
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 193, back to school Shopping in the Philippines so school's back. And for some it's been two years. Like you haven't been to school in two years. For others, it's back after summer vacation again. And this is the same thing in the Philippines. Their kids are going back to school and they haven't been in person for two years. And in fact, the Philippines still has a mask mandate, so everyone is still wearing a mask. In the Philippines, Back to school shopping is on again, only this time, Julia. Julia says it's worse, so here's what she has to say about it. I'm one of those parents who enjoy back to school shopping because I love shopping for school supplies. But even I can acknowledge that it can be exhausting and frustrating. If you want to get the best supplies at a good price, you have to do your research, make price comparisons, and shop early to beat the rush. I think the excitement of going back to school is getting to everybody because everybody was shopping early this year. These past few weeks, all the malls and bookstores were full of people. School supplies are running out of stock, she says. My husband and I went to three different stores just for index cards. Index cards. I barely used index cards when I was a student, but for some reason it's now the hottest stationery of the year. Because of the pandemic, some school supplies were harder now to get than before, not just index cards, she says. I think it's partly due to global supply chain issues and partly because more people had to buy new school supplies than ever before. And it can be expensive. If there's anything that can be reused, we'll reuse it. Many of us would carefully unwind ring notebooks so we could gather the unused pages to make new ones. We would share extra or unused school supplies and books with friends and family. That way we don't need to buy new supplies every year. During the pandemic, we didn't have to buy school supplies, but many of us did use up whatever we had in stock. So when they announced that face to face classes were back, we needed to buy more. A big example of this is school uniforms. Here in the Philippines, all students wear uniforms, regardless of whether they attend public or private school. Pre pandemic, we find ways to make our school uniforms last. We usually buy or have a seamstress make a uniform a little bigger so the uniform can last for at least two years. And when our kids outgrow their uniforms, it can be passed to younger siblings, relatives, friends. But now the kids have all outgrown their uniforms. We're all in a rush to buy uniforms or fabric. There's a shortage of uniform material and a long waiting list. At least four weeks if you want a tailor made uniform. Despite all that, she says, I'm happy that the kids are going back to school. They need social interaction. So our kids were in school in person last year, so this was back to school after summer for us only. We had pulled our kids out of school 10 days early so we could go ride our bikes across Europe, and it felt like the longest summer ever. Certainly not as long as the summer of the Philippines, which has been two years long. But I'm glad that my kids are back to school, too.
