Kickstart: Who's a good skeleton?

Home Depot's 12-foot-tall plastic skeleton Halloween lawn ornament, Skelly, has a new member of the family: a skeleton dog that is 7 feet long and stands 5 feet high.

Listed for sale simply as "Skelly's Dog," the plastic pup has a poseable tail and jaw and features LCD eyes.

The home improvement retailer introduced Skelly with no advertising in 2020, and it took off as families looked for ways to celebrate a season when many activities were curtailed by COVID-19. It's continued to sell out since then and is priced at $399. The dog is priced at $199.

Home Depot advertised the dog briefly in the spring for a "halfway to Halloween" event, and it sold out. Executives told our sister paper Advertising Age that it will be fully restocked for the fall.

It's back-to-school season — or close to it — across the United States, which means families are spending hundreds of dollars to get their kids ready.

The data gurus at Statista say the average U.S. household will spend an estimated $875 this year: $309 on electronics and computer-related equipment; $253 on clothing and accessories; $170 on shoes; and about $141 on general school supplies.

That's down from 2023 when families spent $890, Statista noted. That compares with an average of $400 in 2004 when the company began tracking the costs.

Once a student heads to college, Statista says families should expect average back-to-school shopping costs of $1,300.

How much of that spending is on plastics items is hard to define. Plastics aren't broken out, but they're used in electronics, shoes, pens, vinyl-bound notebooks and of course used in the packaging for everything from glue to disinfectant wipes.

Environmental groups also are stressing ways to avoid plastics in back-to-school shopping by sticking with metal lunch boxes, refillable water bottles, fabric sandwich envelopes and reusable bamboo cutlery. I can appreciate the concept — one Oklahoma State University study said one school-age student using single-use lunch products can produce 67 pounds of waste in a school year — but I have a question: How many weeks do you think it takes for an 8-year-old to lose a $43 stainless steel bento box? Perhaps consider buying a reusable and inexpensive plastic container instead?

Machinery sales were down 36 percent in the second quarter of 2024 vs. 2023, according to the Plastics Industry Association's Committee on Equipment Statistics' report on shipments.

That's not surprising in an atmosphere where lower consumer spending numbers have led to reduced demand and higher interest rates have kept some business owners from expensive capital equipment purchases. But sales generated from NPE2024 may still help cushion the current state of the industry, Plastics News Economics Editor Bill Wood notes.

"Maybe people kicked the tires on the machines and narrowed their options," Bill told PN's Catherine Kavanaugh, adding that they're just waiting to pull the trigger on a final purchase.