Halloween Mutates Into a $2.5-Billion Binge
The costumes, the candy, the parties that go boo in the night--seeing their own kids eat up Halloween--it’s all frightfully unfair.
What’s a nostalgic baby boomer to do?
Spend money, of corpse.
Enter--if you dare--the big business of the New Halloween, the yearly madcap masquerade that has become a $2.5-billion holiday and a slick way to satisfy a retailing black hole between Back to School and Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.
Clearly, Halloween has evolved into a pagan good time with a big payoff. No longer just child’s play, today the night of revelry rings up big bucks with grown-ups buying get-ups and getting down at parties.
Nor is Halloween a one-night trick-or-treating event. It’s a monthlong monster mash with weekends before Halloween spent buying the Fright Stuff and choosing your torture: parties, pumpkin carvings, performance art, dancing and special celebrations at zoos, theme parks, museums, haunted houses, concerts, movies, plays and recreation centers.
Pretty scary stuff, huh?
Not really, say experts, especially if you consider these other frightening facts:
* This year $1 billion will be spent on Halloween costumes and $900 million more on candy. About $5 million will be dropped on greeting cards.
*$157 million worth of advertising will be tied to promotions, including cereal, beer, candy and restaurants and nightclubs hosting parties.
* Halloween is second to Christmas for home decorating, replacing Easter. More than 50% of American homes will decorate to the tune of $60 million.
* One out of three adults will attend a Halloween party, the nation’s third-biggest party day, preceded only by Super Bowl Sunday and New Year’s Eve.
* Halloween is in the Top Five sales days for beer, surpassing St. Patrick’s Day.
Halloween has become a howling big deal because baby boomers, more than any other generation, have never let go of the holiday, says Scott Krugman, spokesman for the National Retail Federation, which represents 1.4 million retail establishments.
“Baby boomers have taken Halloween with them from their childhood to adulthood,” Krugman says, adding that in recent years retailers have been cashing in on the adult fascination by pushing Halloween products earlier every year.
Mike Bernacchi, a marketing professor at the University of Detroit Mercy who has tracked the boost in Halloween business, says research shows many of the baby boomers--men and women born from 1946 to 1964--now have school-age kids of their own and are celebrating with them. And sometimes, without them at parties for grown-ups.
“They won’t let go of Halloween. It’s their own childhood memory of that one night a year that they now have turned into a season for themselves and their families,” says Bernacchi, who is also editor of Under the Mike-roscope newsletter, a marketing and advertising trends publication.
“But the real signal that Halloween has grown is the decorating trend that has evolved along with celebrating,” he says. “We have Halloween trees, bulbs, door decorations and ghost garlands.”
If it sounds like Christmas, he says, it’s because Halloween has become a major league holiday and a “godsend to the economy. Thanksgiving has always been sort of a bridesmaid retail-wise.”
Ben Enis, a USC marketing professor, says the Halloween sales surge mirrors “a manifestation of a surge in family values. The kind of people who are spending to decorate and to have parties are people who want to do things with their children.”
Halloween family time may have been invented by boomers, but it crosses all cultures. Lino Perez, 30, of Mexico will take his 3-year-old son, David, dressed as a Dalmatian, trick or treating in La Can~ada Flintridge.
“For my son, I like the idea of seeing him have a good time and being with other children. In Mexico, we don’t have this holiday,” Perez says.
Sue and Byung Choe and their sons, Scott and Kenneth, immigrated to California from South Korea on Oct. 20, 1974. Eleven days later they discovered trick or treating in homemade costumes.
“It made us feel welcomed because people were saying ‘Come on, come on, come get some candy,’ ” Sue recalls. “But now it’s expensive--the costumes and parties,” says Sue of her dry cleaners customers who talk about Halloween all month.
Enis says that because Halloween is about expressing yourself, “expression demands spending and Americans like to be known as having enough money to do whatever it is they want to do.”
Dwayne Ibsen, spokesman for the 300-member Ohio-based National Costumers Assn., says Americans spend on Halloween “simply because it’s there and everybody is doing it.” Especially adults who make up more than 80% of Halloween costume rentals and spend more than $200 for a costume and $50 for a child’s outfit.
Ibsen says home decorating has skyrocketed. In 1990 five booths at a Halloween market for retailers sold decorative items. This year 25% of the 1,500 booths displayed decorations.
Every Halloween for 24 years, Studio City resident Gary Corb has transformed his home at 4343 Babcock Ave. into a haunted graveyard and house with three rooms that come alive--er, dead--with a skeletal harpist and phantom organist, a ghostly child and a talking statue.
“We spend several hundred dollars a year just on candy,” he says of his Halloween happening that attracted 5,000 visitors last year. “I’d like to think that I snatched Halloween from the jaws of obscurity when we started this back in 1973. But now everyone is decorating.”
John Hashimoto, manager of the Halloween Adventure Shop at the Glendale Galleria, says he’s reordered several decorating items, from cardboard caskets to caldrons. Many adults’ and children’s costumes have sold out and have had to be reordered since the store opened in early September.
“People are buying like crazy. Parents do it for the kids. They’ll spend $30 on a costume and then buy themselves one too. They don’t have time to make the costumes,” Hashimoto says.
Pat Schoenrock of Tujunga used to sew costumes for her kids, now 8, 17 and 20. These days the kids prefer store-bought, and the family spooks up their home with skeletons, spider webs, rats, bats and snakes.
“At Halloween you can be crazy and get away with it,” she says. “People need that kind of escape. That’s what Halloween is all about. You know you don’t have to buy, but you do because you want to, because it takes you back to being a kid.”
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The Scary Facts
Here are some defining moments in recent Halloween history, courtesy of marketing expert Mike Bernacchi:
* 1964-66: “The Addams Family” and “The Munsters” become TV’s symbols of haunted humor.
* 1965: UNICEF starts collecting on Halloween, adding to the day’s impact.
* 1966: “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” goes from comic strip to TV special.
* 1967: “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” becomes a book.
* 1975: “Carrie” is written by Stephen King.
* 1978-90: Michael Myers in “Halloween” terrifies Jamie Lee Curtis and scares up movie sales with four sequels.
* 1983: Coors Brewing Co. hires Elvira as the vamp of beer vats.
* 1992: “Goosebumps” by R.L. Stine is launched with “Welcome to the Dead House.”
* 1994: “The Nightmare Before Christmas” hits movie screens and Charlie Brown Pumpkin Ale is sold in stores.
* 1994-96: MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) campaigns against beer companies for using a kids’ holiday to promote beer.
* 1996: Coors hires Pamela Anderson Lee to promote suds and spirits.
