Back-to-school shopping is running right now, and shoppers aren't in a generous mood. 78% expect to see higher prices on school items this year, according to the National Retail Federation, down slightly from 84% in 2022 but still the majority view. About a third of back-to-school shoppers say they plan their purchases around summer sales specifically, timing their spending to when retailers are already discounting.
They're also comparing more than usual. Capital One Shopping found 51% of 2026 back-to-school shoppers are actively comparing prices, 43% are shopping at discount stores, and 40% are hunting for coupons or sales codes.
Here's the part that doesn't fit the obvious story. Deloitte's 2026 Back-to-School Survey broke spending down by which tools shoppers use to research purchases. Parents who don't use digital research tools at all plan to spend $381 per child. Those using search engines plan to spend $494. Search plus social media pushes that to $531. And parents using search, social media, and generative AI together plan to spend the most of any group: $737.
More research tools, more spending, not less. Whether that's AI surfacing more products worth buying, or heavier tech users simply being bigger spenders to begin with, the survey doesn't say. But it's a genuinely odd pairing: the most price-comparison-heavy shoppers in the data are also the ones planning to spend the most.
Mintel found something that points to why AI shows up here at all: nearly 70% of parents say they're open to using AI tools to simplify back-to-school shopping specifically.
McKinsey's survey across France, Germany, and the UK found 63% of European consumers already use AI to compare brands, prices, and reviews, out of 84% who use AI tools in daily life at all. That's not back-to-school-specific data, but it shows the underlying behavior- price comparison via AI- is established in European markets too, not just something happening in US survey panels.
Roughly half of back-to-school shoppers are actively comparing prices right now, some manually, some with an AI tool doing the legwork. Either way, a price that sits still while a shopper (or their assistant) checks five other retailers is a price that loses that comparison by default, not because it was uncompetitive, but because nobody adjusted it while the checking was happening.
Pricing teams have been reacting to human price-checkers for years already. What's changed this season is how many of those checks now happen instantly and in bulk, whether it's a parent with six browser tabs open or an AI tool doing the same thing in a few seconds. Staying dynamically priced during a season like this isn't really a new problem. It's an old one, moving faster.
For what it's worth, pricing teams are living through a smaller version of the same shift the Deloitte data shows in shoppers: moving from static spreadsheets toward tools you can just ask a question, the way Omnia Agent works.