Boo! Spirit Halloween Is Now Possessing the Christmas Season.
Goodbye, haunted houses. Hello, gingerbread houses.
If Ben Franklin were alive today, he might add a third certainty to his now-familiar axiom: death, taxes, and the late-summer creep of Spirit Halloween filling in vacant retail storefronts across the country.
The almost parasitic quickness with which the spooky seasonal chain moves in on vacant storefronts has become a meme. And with 1,525 locations this year (10 years ago it was just eclipsing 1,000), it’s easy to feel as if there’s a Spirit Halloween around every corner. But as reliably as the stores show up once August turns to September, Spirit Halloween’s doors close by mid-November.
This year, however, 10 locations will go from witchy to winter wonderland and become the first Spirit Christmas stores.
Yes, everyone’s favorite meme-ified spot to get into the Halloween spirit is here to help you deck the halls this year as well. Spirit Christmas will have “stocking stuffers, holiday apparel, fun gifts, unique decor, plus all the special trimmings for creating an unforgettable Christmas,” according to the store’s website. And what Christmas store would be complete without visits with Santa Claus? While merry on the surface, Spirit Halloween’s intrusion into the Christmas season is an indicator of the perennial battle facing brick-and-mortar establishments in the digital age—especially when it comes to the attention economy.
When everything is a click away from being at your doorstep in two days or less, it’s easy to eschew the in-person shopping experience, especially during stressful times like the holidays. Getting the shopping done—whether it’s procuring the devil horns to complete your costume or purchasing an aerosol can to spray faux snow on your windows—is more important than having the experience of waiting in a long line and paying more money for things you pull out of storage only once a year.
How did we get here? Spirit Halloweens may be ubiquitous, but they’re not necessarily providing high-quality holiday wares. Their costumes are so low-rent they’ve spurred memes of their own. But for more than 40 years, Spirit has had such a grip on the Halloween market that even established players like Party City are rethinking their strategy.
The National Retail Federation estimates that Americans will spend $11.6 billion this Halloween. That’s less than last year’s record-high $12.2 billion, but spending has been ticking up nearly every year since 2005, when the NRF began collecting this data, with millennials largely responsible for Halloween’s sprawl.
It’s a pop-up economy held together by short-term leases, thousands of seasonal workers, and last-minute costume purchases. With that kind of financial guarantee, it makes sense to extend those three-month leases just a bit—after all, Christmas creep begins earlier year after year.
But where Spirit Halloween offers up just the bare bones for a haunted holiday, the company’s Christmas stores will come equipped with a “life-sized gingerbread village” and the chance to take a photo with Santa. And those photos with Santa will be free.
Just as Spirit Halloween took over the corpses of the department stores that came before it, Spirit Christmas is planting its flag on the North Pole experience pioneered by the mall Santas of yore—without the hefty price tag (and seemingly without the long lines: you can book a visit online).
It’s just another example of how the tactile shopping experience is competing with the attention economy. Although Spirit Halloween’s success is due largely to a combination of lucrative short-term leases and guaranteed seasonal shoppers, there’s no denying that it has benefited from a cultural groundswell of everything Halloween- and horror-related. It’s niche, yes, but the folks interested in that niche are passionate about it, despite the deprecating memes.
Whether that will translate into success for Spirit’s newest holiday venture is another question entirely. But if the company’s spooky-season dominance is any indication, all the mall Santas out there should be watching their backs—because Spirit Christmas is coming for their bag.
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