Officeworks’ School List Service

Every year, when everyone is preparing for Christmas, a computer server somewhere is calculating the prices of hundreds of school list items to maximise the profit margin of compnay. Ensuring that the the majority of prices are below the previous year’s school booklist prices to minimise the financial cost of their “Parents’ Price Promise”.

Besides the removal of the in-store book list drop-off, and also being unable to pay the booklist in store if you want to use giftcards, exactly how good is Officeworks’ School List Service?

Having submitted three booklists for a school in Western Australia, here are my findings.

Officeworks use ‘home brands’ like Keji and J Burrows, but for some reason they use minimal Studymate and none of the new Kadink brands which is significantly less expensive.

As an example a booklist item was “Glue Kids UHU PVA 125ml” for $4.50. Officeworks did recomend the Studymate brand for $3.98, but not the Kadink brand for $2.97.

Another example is “Exercise Book Protext A4 96 Page 14mm Dotted Thirds Goanna” for $1.95. Officeworks recommended the “Protext A4 70gsm 14mm Dotted Thirds Exercise Book 64 Pg Blue” for $1.66, which is 64 pages, not 96 pages. But Officeworks wouldn’t recomend “Studymate A4 70gsm 14mm Dotted Thirds Exercise Book 96 Page” for $1.79, even though it is a closer match with the same amount of pages.

The only 20% price match that I had was the “Chalk Crayola Sidewalk Assorted Pack 12” for $4.35, which Officeworks’ original price was $4.48, the price matched price was $3.48. Though, when I tried to check-out this book list item I received the message “Some items on this list may be out of stock! Please handle before proceeding”, for any store I sellected to collect from. Yet, if I checked the stock on the product page, the majority of stores showed “Available at this store”.

I received a “The following items are unavailable at Officeworks” for “A4 Quill Paper Assorted 250 Pack” for $11.95, though Officeworks does stock this exact item “Quill A4 Paper Bright Assorted 250 Pack” for $20.47, did they not want to price match, maybe. I was able to price match in-store, but instead of the beat it by 20% Parents’ Price Promise they gave me the standard 5% Price Beat Guarantee.

So what should one do, well, if you are restricted for time, I don’t believe Officeworks’ School List Service will be any benefit, as some items will be unavailable or unstocked, which means you still need to source from elsewhere or in-store.

If you have the time and want to save some money, the best option is to submit the booklist and obtain the suggestions, and then take that in-store and collect them yourself, this way you can view each item on the shelf surounded by alterntives that Officeworks may have failed to suggest. As an example, many of the Kadink art products are better value and give you more colours at the same time. I found the Officework customers are happy to assist, even with finding particular items on the shelf.