September is just around the corner! You know what that means. Back to school!

If you are a parent, like me, that’s a good news, bad news situation. Believe me, I am very happy to see my 3 kids boarding the bus. We’ve had a great summer, but its time to get them out of the house. So back-to-school time is a good thing.

The bad news is clothing. It already feels like someone is tugging at my wallet. All the kids need new clothes. Nothing fits. And everything is so expensive!

So feeling sorry for myself, I decided to use Pitney Bowes MapInfo’s demographic data to find out who’s spending the most on children’s clothing, and where those people come from. I keep a large set of MapInfo demographic products stored in a database on my server, and I access the data using BI tool that is integrated with MapInfo. That means I can whip up a map and report at a moment’s notice. I expected to see my own neighborhood, maybe even my own home, highlighted red and flashing. Instead I was surprised. Here’s what I found.

Top 5 Towns and Cities* / Annual Expenditure per Person on Children’s Apparel

Brookings, OR     $ 444.69
Palm Coast, FL    $ 361.85
Grants Pass, OR  $ 361.25
Payson, AZ         $ 343.73
Prescott, AZ       $ 331.01
* U.S. Census-defined Core Based Statistical Areas

At first glance, this might appear to me sort of a mismatched group. Oregon? Arizona? Florida? What do these places have in common? Wealthy families with young kids? Nope.

Turns out one thing - two depending on how you count.

Grandparents.

All 5 towns rank high for the percentage of the population that falls into two of the Pitney Bowes MapInfo PSYTE Advantage groups: “Active Seniors” and “Here to Stay.” The PSYTE Advantage system seeks to identify neighborhoods in the U.S. and Canada by the characteristics of the population. These free-spending, children’s clothing buyers come from towns that can be characterized by high percentage of people living in the two particular neighborhood types. On average, 66% of the population in these towns falls into these two groups. In Brookings, OR, 77% of the population is in these two groups.

“Active Seniors” and “Here to Stay” are people in neighborhoods where the demographic is clearly skewed to the older generation. “Active Seniors” have a higher than average likelihood of being white, widowed and over 75. “Here to Stay” folks are generally over 50, living in empty-nest, two-person households.

Grandma? Grandpa? If you’re listening: girls size 12 and 9, and boys size 8.