Weird Filofax/Planner discovery

I mentioned in a post a few months back how many shops had reduced their Filofax stocks dramatically, some not stocking them at all anymore. I buy my refills online so didn’t notice anything amiss but today while I was in town I thought I would get a third refill for my A5. I usually have two because my appointments change so drastically that I fairly often have to rewrite my pages. I am left-handed so pencil tends to smudge a lot when I write so I use pen.

I popped into a bookshop and there were two women asking for Filofaxes. The shop had none left. And all the planner and planner refill shelves were almost totally empty, as though locusts had rampaged through them. They had none of the refills I wanted so I went to three more stationery shops (one an office supply shop, one a large department store and one a bookshop) – none. All of them had sold out of almost all their paper planners and refills. The shelves were almost bare with a few planners left here and there. In the last shop I tried, the sales person had to tell about three people in as many minutes that all the planners were sold out. I asked him if they had perhaps underestimated how many people still use paper planners and he said he thought that was definitely it. He also said that they had not thought to re-order so the few that were left were the last they would have in a while.

Has anyone else noticed that planner shelves in their shops have also been a little less well-stocked and/or rather empty after the December/January rush?

In the end I did find my A5 refills in the fourth shop I tried and there were only two left. I thought of getting the last one too but refrained.

I use Burde (Swedish brand) A5 Week to View because they have nice little blocks to write in (makes it easier to see exactly what I am doing when. And they have multiple holes so I can switch between binder brands. The paper is nice and the colour is gentle on the eyes.

This is a rather dodgy scan of what the pages look like. As you can see the blocks are nicely defined so it is easier to confine your writing to a tidy space. Swedes eat lunch early so that is why the narrow strip for lunch is about 12. And they celebrate name days so each day shows what name is being celebrated. My name day is 29 May! The names change every couple of years. And you can also see that the holes fit different types of binder so it is easy to switch. I like the right hand column for notes as well. There are also a few lines at the bottom of each page for notes and tear off corners (which I prefer to the Today ruler) to easily flip to the right week. They have lovely variations of refills too. Their page a day is gorge!

Update a day later: I was back in the biggest bookstore in town today to buy keyrings (off topic but they had cute little cars on and my surname is Carr so I had to!) and the same thing was happening. People were wandering around looking for planners and they had none. I heard two ask for Filofax and they were sent to another store who stocked them but the rest just wanted a plain paper planner and there were none left.