Examining the Business of Halloween
As Halloween approaches, the ruins of businesses past undergo metamorphosis
Between a Staples in its death throes and a faded PetSmart, something’s afoot. Not long ago, the space along Alewife Brook Parkway in Cambridge, MA housed a sizable A.C. Moore. But since the art supplier went defunct and liquidated inventory in 2019, the property has remained vacant.
Rather, the property was vacant until a few weeks ago.
As surrounding trees erupt in brilliant vermillion and umber, a bright orange banner covers the shadows of the former aluminum signage. In big block letters, a flimsy placard reveals that HALLOWEEN CITY now occupies the space.
Like the leaves, these establishments are ephemeral. But with every passing autumn, the number of transitory Halloween superstores continues to increase.
If you’ve never actually been to of these pop-up ventures, I can confirm that they are exactly what they sound like. There are costumes available for all ages, novelty decorations for whatever party you might want to throw. I once saw a beer bong consisting of a skull funnel attached to a tube shaped like a spinal cord. There are animatronics and inflatables for those motivated to transform their yard or porch into a temporary hellscape. Once vacuous spaces, for just a few short months each year, become otherworldly destinations filled with fluorescent lights shining on fake cobwebs and rubber rats.
In some ways, the whole operation behind a store like Halloween City makes perfect sense. The business of Halloween is a lucrative one; one estimate projects that Americans will spend a record-breaking 10 billion dollars on Halloween in 2021, with 65% of the population planning to celebrate the holiday. But the presence of these businesses is also a bit of a strange ritual-within-ritual when you take a step back.
Originally a liturgical observance of the dearly departed in medieval Europe, the last day of October has transmuted into a capitalist fueled hyper-celebration of all things spooky. The Halloween stores we see today are the natural consequence of that change, the logical endpoint when trying to determine how to grab as much cash as possible from the holiday extravaganza.
But how, exactly, did we come to the collective decision to convert the skeletons of megamarts into structures used to sell actual skeletons? Moreover, is there something that allows these niche markets to survive where so many other larger endeavors have crumbled?
The Lifecycle of Big Box Halloween stores
Chances are, you know of a place much like the empty A.C. Moore I described a few paragraphs ago. This is far from a coincidence. At the beginning of the year, a report from Fortune estimated that approximately 12,200 retail stores closed their doors for good. 2017, 2018, and 2019 yielded record-breaking store closures as well. Many of the victims first to falter were the big-box specialty stores and low traffic shopping malls, which many experts correctly identified as being unsustainable long-term use.
Pinpointing an exact cause of death is trickier than identifying the slew of comorbidities plaguing superstores across the country. First came the artificial growth in shopping centers that sprung up faster than what the population could keep up with. Vendors were eager to take advantage of accelerated depreciation in their business ventures, and for a while, American consumers were convinced that they needed floor-to-ceiling stocked shelves just to get by.
While that alone would have probably been enough to end in disaster, the drastic changes in 21st-century spending habits accelerated the demise. Few could have predicted the exponential rise of e-commerce, a 400 billion dollar industry that made up 13.3% of total retail spending during the second quarter of 2021. The rise of the experience economy1 presented another problem entirely for establishments with little else to offer outside of the products stocked on their shelves. The 2008 recession caused a wave of financial woes, and COVID-19 closures killed off many of the struggling survivors from the first destructive wave.
With each death, all that is left behind is the store’s decaying shell and a waking nightmare for urban planners. On rare occasions, creative minds find ways to make use of the graying structures. For instance, the town of McAllen, Texas turned their forsaken Walmart into a sprawling single-story library. But for the most part, nothing happens to most former shops.
Found flanking high capacity arterial roads to attract customers, they’re often inaccessible to reach without a car, effectively eliminating foot traffic. What’s more, the spaces are impractical for small business or dining purposes. Despite consuming so much valuable real estate, no one wants to reclaim the corpses afloat on our asphalt seas. There are more vacancies than there are potential tenants, and the disparity in those numbers only continues to increase each year.
As a property sits vacant, it drains funds from the leasing landlords. Some may choose to eat the cost and retain useless space purely to prevent a competitor from snatching up real estate. Many more are anxious to find ways to generate some income from otherwise unprofitable locations.
All sorts of opportunistic pop-up endeavors take advantage of all the ample space and desperation that a defunct Circuit City can conjure 2. Halloween stores often pay above requested rent fees in order to secure short-term leases from proprietors seeking to make up for losses.
When real estate is secured, the planning process begins. Based on a listing posted on the Spirit Halloween website, spaces ranging from 5,000 to 50,000 square feet are considered by the company. Hastily hired help will usually begin to set up supplies in the waning days of August. Stores open to the public around Labor Day, and shut down shop within the first few days of November. The whole process happens at thousands of locations across North America. Repeat ad nauseum year after year, and you have the Halloween store pop-up as it is today.
Franchises like Halloween City (a Party City subsidiary) and Spirit Halloween are what is known as category killers. Over the years, specialty costume shops have been wiped out because they can’t compete with the resources made available by a larger corporation. Relaible mom-and-pop businesses have shut down, further increasing the temporary demand for masks, disguises, and party favors in the early weeks of autumn.
For just a little while, the visiting nomadic pop-up makes it easy to forget about the increasing issues that stem from growing greyfields and urban decay. But does the transitory nature of these establishment really leave them impervious to the woes plaguing businesses around the country? Or do they move fast enough for customers to ignore the pitfalls?
The Glutton’s Dillema
When you actually step through the threshhold and into the confines of a pop-up Halloween shop, the narrative gets a bit more complicated. Though the frequency of these shops continues to increase, the mood inside of the Halloween City along Alewife Brook Parkway was somber and lifeless. And not in the sort of way that’s appropriate for Halloween.
One of the first things greeting visitors at the door was not a preview of the season’s trending costumes or a frightening spector. Instead, you will find an impossible to miss hiring sign, offering a temporary salary just above the state’s minimum wage requirements and no real employee benefits (save a “generous” associate’s discount).
Looking around, it’s difficult to spot anyone working at the store at all, with the exception of a single, bored-looking cashier. Even the allure and “fun” of working in a novelty shop evidently isn’t enough to overcome labor shortages plaguing the US workforce. For many, the reality of trying to scrape by with a paycheck that doesn’t cover the cost of living has become more frightening than the monsters that pop out and scare us each October.
It’s not just the lack of people that creates an air of emptiness, though. Despite a distinct lack of foot traffic, the shelves are sparse too.
Of course, this is not an issue unique to the Halloween industry. I have not been able to by my favorite shampoo for weeks now. The beef broth I needed to cook my dinner with a few nights ago was missing from the supermarket shelves. Issues in the supply chain 3 have made it increasingly difficult to find many of the niceties we once took for granted.
Here, those shortages don’t just look like a lack of rubber masks or a few missing sizes for a particular product. It means none of the extraneous decorations that might make going to a costume store an experience rather than a chore. With massive swaths of bright white tile separating scant, shaky shelves, it feels like walking through one of the sad K-Marts that many of these locations were in a former life.
What’s more, many of the things that are available lack the finesse in products that a small shop might be able to provide. The mass-marketed decorations and accessories are poorly made, and some of them flat out don’t make sense. But they do not need to, because they are the only option that exists (unless you have the skill and creativity to create ornaments of your own).
Of course, no two locations are exactly the same. A few days after my Halloween City visit, the Spirit Halloween picking at the carrion of a South Shore Plaza vacancy seemed to have a bit more traffic, a bit less empty space. But there were still visible signs of struggle. I noticed a string of costumes at least a few years old 4, no doubt brought out from a warehouse to make shortages seem a bit less noticable.
Towards the end of my walk around the Cambridge Halloween City, I peaked around the side of a large cardboard cut out promoting an upcoming Ghostbusters ressurection. There, I found piles of boxes and plastic wrap strewn across the floor. Along the walls, you could still find traces of the fallen art store. There is no need to tidy up, because just as soon as this strange business appeared, it will have vanished.
Perhaps the thing to fear most this Halloween is not the ghouls and goblins that inhabit your transitory suburban holiday shop of choice. Instead, the horror may lie in the circumstances that allow these stores to continue growing and thriving year after year. Low pay, cheap quality, and short supplies be damned.
There is concrete evidence that Millenials and Gen Z spend significantly more money on expenses that provide an “experience” (gym memberships, restaurants, vacations) than previous generations. While COVID quarantines and closures have increased demand for concrete goods (i.e. clothes, furniture, etc) in younger generations, the paradigm shift has created significant problems for department stores already struggling to keep their head above water.
For instance, at least one such empty ex-emporium near the Rhode Island border was temporarily resurrected as a mass COVID inoculation site during the start of vaccine rollouts.
Not quite sure what the supply chain problem is? Here’s a simplified analogy that trade analyst Eric Oak explains in this Slate article:
Imagine installing a single doggy door in your house. One dog at a time can get through the door without much of a fuss. But if two dogs try to go through the door at the same time, they’ll take a much longer time to get inside because they’re in one another’s way. We’re actually buying and importing more goods than ever, but our existing infrastructure is not designed to handle the unexpected uptick.
How do I know that the costumes I’m looking at are old? It’s actually kind of a funny story. I grew up about 25 minutes away from the Spirit Halloween headquarters in Egg Harbor Township, NJ. I assume they hire models locally, because the guy that is featured in the “Sergeant Short Pants” costume went to high school with me. I am absolutely certain that I saw this specific costume on shelves several years ago.