Buying Into a Pumpkin Experience : Marketing: Stores may sell them a lot cheaper, but urban patches such as Pumpkin City offer buyers ambience along with the jack-o’-lantern-to-be.
When it comes to pumpkins, Kathy Magnuson admits to being picky.
“I like the funky ones,” she said with a curious smile, walking over to grab yet another candidate for the annual autumnal scene she sets up in the front yard of her Irvine home. “They have to have ridges and they have to be dark.”
Magnuson, like so many camera-toting parents with excited children in tow, had come to Pumpkin City in Santa Ana for an afternoon escape in a fall fantasyland.
Never mind that the pumpkins cost up to 10 times as much as those found in the bins at supermarkets. This was an experience--row and rows of pumpkins surrounded by barnyard animals, pony rides and a replica of an Indian village.
In an age of speciality shopping, urban pumpkin patches like Pumpkin City are increasingly popping up to satisfy consumer quests for the perfect jack-o’-lantern.
In some cases, the pumpkin proprietors are the same folks who operate Christmas tree lots. They have found that pumpkins can stretch their sales season by a month or more, helping them to spread fixed setup costs--lights, fences, outbuildings and the like--over a longer selling season.
Barbara Stilwell, a 30-year veteran of the Christmas tree business, said she started a pumpkin lot two years ago to help pay for her 10-year-old son’s braces.
“This is fun,” said Stilwell, manager of Don Clark’s Pumpkin Patch on Warner Avenue in Huntington Beach. “They come in here with cameras and the kids yell, ‘Pumpkins!’ and they run in.”
Her simple lot, with a little cemetery, a couple of scarecrows, a ghost and a wheelbarrow, pales in sheer grandeur compared to the four Pumpkin City locations, another family-owned operation that has turned its lots into temporary, miniature theme parks built around a fall harvest theme.
Children can frolic in a tepee village, ride a live pony or a variety of coin-operated amusements, consult with live goats and piglets or even, yes, pick out a pumpkin. At the flagship location near the Laguna Hills Mall, Pumpkin City offers a guy running around in a pumpkin suit, train rides, free shows and music--all because of an idea that hit a cash-strapped electrician as he drove home one afternoon.
Bill Derentz said he got into the business when he was a newlywed and needed a little extra money. One afternoon in 1977, he saw a pumpkin patch growing in Irvine and got to wondering.
“I went out there and bought a pickup truckload,” Derentz recalled. “I showed my wife and said, ‘We’re going to make a lot of money off these.’ I sold them in a front yard in Santa Ana.”
The next year, Bill and Debbie Derentz became more ambitious. They bought 10 pickup loads of pumpkins, so many that they decided to call the operation Pumpkin City.
Today, a company delivers its loads by semi-truck--12 to 14 in all--to supply the 300 tons of pumpkins.
He acknowledges his pumpkin prices are substantially higher than those offered at supermarkets, which sell pumpkins cheaply to attract Halloween shoppers. Pumpkin City, however, is selling an experience. The entertainment and other costs mean a basketball-size pumpkin can command $9.50 or more.
In contrast, Vons is giving away pumpkins up to 15 pounds with a $10 purchase and newspaper coupon, while Lucky is advertising its pumpkins at 9 cents a pound.
Magnuson was looking to Pumpkin City to supply most of the needs for her front-yard display. From pumpkins she moved to the cornstalks ($5 a bundle) and was later seen eyeing the Indian corn.
“I think it’s great,” she said of Pumpkin City, noting that she had already looked elsewhere. “They have better pumpkins--more selection.”
While it is generally Christmas tree lot operators who turn to pumpkins, Derentz has done just the opposite. In November, the Pumpkin King will recraft his lots and reopen selling trees.
But he has stayed true to his origins. Though it may sound a little funny, the lot is called Pumpkin City’s Christmas Trees.
