Walmart launches low-price back-to-school push with meals and faster delivery

Walmart is pairing its lowest prices since 2019 on the 14 most popular school supplies with meals, faster delivery and more than 1,300 extra Rollbacks as it tries to pull families into bigger back-to-school baskets. Some school items start at 25 cents, and lunch options in the campaign average less than $2 per meal.

The Bentonville, Arkansas retailer rolled out the push on July 15, widening the offer beyond notebooks and backpacks into apparel, tech, lunch gear and groceries for lunchboxes. Customers can get a first-day setup, supplies, backpack, lunch and a head-to-toe outfit for under $65, while the broader campaign uses “affordable solutions for every stage of the school journey.”

It is built to create multiple trips across the store and online, with supply-list tools that steer shoppers toward teacher-recommended lists and shopping by school level. The company is also pushing curbside pickup, Walmart+, and Express Delivery in as little as 30 minutes.

For hourly associates, customer questions are straightforward and repetitive: which supplies are at the 25-cent level, what is included in the lowest-price school list, where the lunch deals are, and whether an item can be picked up faster than a regular trip. On the sales floor, that translates into more item-location requests, more price checks, more stocking pressure and more endcap resets as the assortment shifts to keep the low-price message visible.

By early July 2025, 67% of back-to-school shoppers had already begun buying, the highest early-shopping share the National Retail Federation had tracked since it began measuring the category in 2003 with Prosper Insights & Analytics. Deloitte’s 2026 Back-to-School Survey put expected spending per child at $557.

Last year, Walmart offered a full first-day basket for under $65 and introduced a one-click food basket at about $2 per day.