Cost-U-Mania!

The Halloween outlets are everywhere! I may be more immediately exposed to them than most because the Halloween outlet’s natural habitat is the run-down strip mall, and New Jersey is the run-down strip mall capital of the world, but I suspect something else is at work, here.

No, it’s not merely the drive to add Halloween to Christmas as a consumer-driven economic engine, though that’s what underlies the appearance of the outlets in the first place. No, it’s not the transformation of the holiday from “kids’ night out” to “dress like a slut day.” No, it’s not a genuine need for all these merchandisers of costumes and plastic axes—not every couple hundred yards, it isn’t.

It’s property values.

Like locusts or desert vegetation, the Halloween outlets are seasonal opportunists, erupting briefly to exploit a short-lived niche and disappearing throughout the rest of the year. It’s a narrow niche, too; even at the peak of the season, profits are touch-and-go, considering the lease, the cost of making an abandoned shop presentable, shipping the goods in, and shipping them out again because the customers I see inside do more looking than buying. (We want to believe; we want an excuse to buy the toys. But they’re such shoddy toys it’s hard even for a kid at heart to shell out his bucks for them.)

But two of those boundary conditions limiting profit have changed dramatically. The collapse in the housing market, and with it the office space market and other construction interests, have lowered the cost of a lease, including a short-term lease. In good times, short-term leases pay a premium because the lessor knows he’ll have to go through the hassle of drumming up another customer and retouching the space shortly. But in bad times, even a short-term renter is better than the alternative of no renter at all. Add in the construction crews’ desperation to drum up some business, and the overhead for a Halloween outlet drops dramatically.

So the outlets are everywhere. Yesterday, we passed two Halloween shops separated by just two or three store fronts. And they make the area look sketchy. Low-rent. Though not, I suppose, as sketchy as the alternative of no renter at all.