Retailers scare up sales for newest shopping season

MINNEAPOLIS — 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, of Eagan, Minn., Halloween has become a monthlong 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. She plans to line her walkway 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.

The federation, an industry-trade group in Washington, D.C., said nearly two-thirds of consumers had planned to hold Halloween celebrations this year, up from 52 percent last year. Consumers said they plan to spend 22 percent more on average this year: $59 per person.

Among 18- to 24-year-olds, 85 percent plan to celebrate Halloween, up from 67 percent in 2005.

"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 based 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 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. 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."

In the past, it was enough for discount stores such as Wal-Mart to devote a few aisles to treats and kids costumes. Now, with adults throwing more parties, they have to devote more shelf space to adult-sized costumes and increasingly sophisticated decorations.

Even so, 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.