"Anticipate purchases to limit costs": behind the scenes of the UFC-Que Choisir survey on school supplies

Noé Bauduin, a data journalist for UFC-Que Choisir, reveals the behind-the-scenes details of the association's annual survey on the prices of school supplies.

What methodology do you use?

We've implemented a tool that tracks daily online prices at all drive-through locations in France. Since all retailers now have drive-through locations, this provides a very broad, accurate, and robust overview. We've established a standard basket of 118 products, and we're tracking their price changes over time.

What are the main trends in recent years?

We see that prices are generally up slightly this year, by around 2%. In 2024, these prices were down 1%. We could therefore talk about stability... But that would be forgetting that these prices increased by nearly 10% per year in previous years, in 2023 and 2022. We therefore remain on a plateau, with high prices.

You have highlighted a fairly significant fluctuation in prices between summer and the start of the school year...

Prices increase sharply, by around 10%, at the start of the school year, compared to the offers currently available at the end of summer. This is important information for families: they need to plan their purchases in advance to limit costs.

But some establishments only give out these famous lists at the start of the school year...

At the very least, we need to plan for the essentials, even though we know that some teachers will sometimes have very specific requests. We can imagine that parent-teacher associations will try to address this issue and push teachers and schools to provide these famous lists as soon as possible...