When the invisible hand is ghostly.
As the warmth of summer fades, and the leaves begin to turn, something else appears—the Spirit Halloween store. They pop up in vacant retail spots, and stick around for 2 or 3 months, vanishing just as quickly as they appeared—a few days after October 31.
Spirit Halloween is an emblem of successful seasonal retail, but to some it embodies all that is crass and commercial about the inflation of Halloween as a holiday. They sell costumes and spooky decorations, at a very affordable price.
Just like fast fashion, speedy production means you can get costumes based on this summer’s movie hits and current memes—often more convincingly than the costumes of the 1980s. (They have even caught onto the social media celebrity of baby hippo Moo Deng, by using her image to advertise their pet costumes on Instagram.)
What Spirit Halloween demonstrates is both creative reuse (it operates because of retail churn, and a volume of empty storefronts at any given time) and the success of globalization. Their products (again, like fast fashion), are designed to be affordable and to a large degree disposable. Nobody is hanging on to these costumes to pass them on to their kids.
And this kind of seasonal, affordable good largely comes to us today from China. One of the sources is the Futian Market, which offers seasonal decorations as well as other consumer goods, and supplies discount stores around the world. Futian is regarded as “The world’s biggest wholesale market.” If you ever wondered where the light-up Santa ornaments at the dollar store (or the glow-in-the-dark skeletons at Spirit Halloween) came from, there’s a good chance they came from Futian.
(Several years ago, the podcast 99% Invisible visited Futian, to explore how they supply the world.)
Spirit Halloween was established in 1983, and it is now part of Spencer’s Gifts (a firm itself founded in 1947 to sell novelties). Today, they operate 1,400 stores each season. They’re such a familiar part of the landscape that there was even a movie based on the store, and they’ve been parodied on Saturday Night Live.)
But Spirit Halloween is part of a broader tradition, that of the seasonal pop-up retailer. The classic of these is the Christmas tree market, itself a cultural evolution from seasonal agricultural markets.
We also have Christmas pop-up stores for festive decorations, although none as recognizable as the Spirit Halloween brand. There also used to be a few places one could find Christmas stores year-round. They largely disappeared right around the time it became possible for people to shop online, so anyone who desperately wanted to get some reindeer ornaments in March could get them from eBay.
Spirit Halloween straddles both worlds. They have an online storefront, but their spread of physical stores means you can also go in person to pick out your costume and decorations. Their brand visibility means you know what you’ll get, and you know where to go when you realize on October 30 that you need some fake blood for your vampire costume.
Whatever you think of their products, they’re there because there is consumer demand.
Spirit Halloween is the spirit of the market.
Additional Reading:
Why Halloween Costumes Used to Be Terrible by Richard Lorenc
5 Economic Principles My Kids Learned on Halloween by Kerry McDonald
5 Reasons We Love Halloween by Jeffrey A. Tucker
Halloween: The Night Kids Discover Economics by James Peron
