ShareThisBy CHRIS SERRES
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Mary Seidel remembers when Halloween was a one-day event with homemade costumes and pillowcases that served as "trick or treat" containers.
Not anymore.
For Seidel, Halloween has become a month-long event. She has dressed up her yard with bright-orange garden mums, wrapped fake cobwebs around the pillars of her basement and hung decorative ears of corn on her front door. Her walkway will be lined with glowing plastic pumpkins to help guide visitors to her two Halloween parties.
"It gives me an excuse to decorate," said Seidel, 42, a mother of five children, who spoke while shopping at Wal-Mart. "Oh, look! A bag of bones!"
Seidel is one of millions of Americans who have made Halloween second only to Christmas in sales of home decorations. The days when Halloween shopping meant a trip to the local drugstore to buy a boxed mask or a cape are over. Parents are filling their shopping carts with Halloween decor that would have seemed out of place just five years ago _ from moss-covered terra cotta pumpkins to 6-foot-tall moaning mummies and plastic tombstones.
In fact, sales of all things Halloween-related are expected to reach a record $4.96 billion in 2006, up from $3.29 billion a year ago, according to the National Retail Federation.
"Halloween used to be a single night. Now it's a fall festival," said Phil Rist, vice president of strategy at Bigresearch, a consumer intelligence firm in Worthington, Ohio. "It's the bridge between summertime and Christmas."
Retailers deserve much of the credit. During the past decade, they've managed to stretch the Oct. 31 holiday to fill two months' worth of shelf space. Wal-Mart rolled out its Halloween section, "Spooky Central," located in its garden centers, in mid-August, and Target Corp. over Labor Day weekend introduced its "Harvest Hollow," Maple Manor" and "Creepy Cottage" collections, among others. Even home-improvement retailers are getting in on the act, with Home Depot adding Halloween decorations to its stores for the first time this year.
However, the increased emphasis on Halloween has made for some odd juxtapositions on store shelves. Retailers are increasing their assortment of Halloween decorations at the same time they are moving forward their winter holiday merchandise. The result can be disorienting. At Target, for instance, Christmas tree lights can be found in the same section as 6-foot skeletons, pumpkin-shaped throw pillows and the "animated candy bowls" with hands that automatically grab at trick or treaters.
"There is a real fight over space," said Stan Pohmer, a Minneapolis retail consultant. "Halloween sales are so strong that they don't want to take that down, but Christmas is so huge they have to kick that off early. ... Go back 10 years ago, this wasn't the case."
Even so, retailers aren't reading too much into the bullish forecasts for Halloween sales. The main reason is that spending on Halloween-related items still pales in comparison to gift-related holidays such as Christmas, Valentine's Day and Easter. The average consumer will spend $791.10 in the weeks leading up to Christmas, compared to $59.06 for Halloween, according to the National Retail Federation.
