June 2025: laundry, cereal, and one very good pen

June is a restocking month. School lets out, routines change, and the pantry and laundry room take the hit. This month's list is mostly supplies, with two exceptions that we suspect were bought late at night.

The household half

Tide Simply liquid laundry detergent was the most-bought item of the month by a comfortable margin. It is the value line rather than the flagship formula, and readers are quite specific about why they choose it: it handles ordinary dirt on ordinary clothes, and summer produces an enormous volume of ordinary dirt. Several people mentioned keeping the standard formula for the hard loads and using this for everything else.

Honey Bunches of Oats honey roasted arrived in the same carts. Cereal consumption in a house with children roughly doubles the week school ends, which is not a scientific finding but is supported by our inbox.

The cooking project

Bradley Smoker beech bisquettes were the summer-project purchase. Bradley's system uses compressed wood pucks that feed automatically, which is either the entire appeal or the entire objection depending on which kind of smoker person you are. Beech is mild, and the readers who bought it were mostly smoking fish and poultry rather than going straight to brisket, which is the sensible way to start.

And two things for one person

The ZIG Karappo empty brush pen is a refillable brush pen sold without ink, so you fill it with whatever you like. It is a small, specific, deeply satisfying object, and the people who bought it were lettering artists and journal keepers rather than anyone with a practical need.

The Fender Ten 3 in-ear monitors were the month's serious purchase. Fender's in-ear line comes out of their custom audio work, and these went to a mix of musicians and people who simply wanted better isolation for travel. A few readers noted, correctly, that in-ear monitors and consumer earbuds are not the same category and should not be compared as if they were.

What June lists usually look like

Almost every June list we have published follows this shape: a large volume of consumables and one or two personal items that have nothing to do with the household. We think that is healthy. A year of shopping that is entirely detergent and cereal is a grim year, and a pen that costs very little and gets used every day is one of the better deals in any household.

Next month the grills come out properly and the list gets louder. June is the deep breath before it.

One last observation about restocking months. The readers who tell us they never run out of anything are not more organized than everyone else. They simply buy the same few things on the same trip every time, and they have stopped treating the pantry as a place for decisions. June is a good month to copy that, because the routine is already broken and a new habit has room to take hold before autumn arrives and the calendar fills up again.

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