From its spooky thrills to its magical traditions, it’s no wonder Halloween is the second-largest commercial holiday in America after Christmas. Each fall season, retail stores bring in upwards of $10 billion, and this year is expected to be no different!
The largest of these Halloween retail store chains is Spirit Halloween, which was founded in 1983 and originated in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. With over 1,500 locations across the United States (and even some in Canada!), you may already be familiar with the pop-up store.
Each year, normally near the start of fall, Spirit Halloween stores set up shop in previously vacant storefronts for the spooky season. They bring out fearsome and fiendish costumes, spine-chilling animatronics, and sinister decorations that are sure to give many a scare!
Due to its scale, Spirit Halloween has become a convenient store chain for many Americans to visit for all of their ghoulish necessities. In Santa Clarita alone, there are three Spirit Halloween stores, ensuring that no matter what corner of the city you live in, you can celebrate this Halloween season in style!
Our local locations include one in Newhall at 25510 The Old Road, which took over a former Toys R Us, one in Valencia at 27029 McBean Parkway, which was a former Party City, and one in Canyon Country at 16642 Soledad Canyon Road, which used to be a Rite Aid.
The latter opened up this year for the first time and has already seen great success. I checked out the store myself, and, just like every other Spirit Halloween, it had all of the fearsome decor you could imagine!
However, Spirit Halloween is just that; it’s the same store with the same products at each location. Pop-up stores used to be a novelty—a place you’d stumble upon unexpectedly, offering unique finds you couldn’t get anywhere else.
Nowadays, though, retail stores and conglomerates, such as Spirit Halloween, have turned the once spontaneous concepts of pop-ups and mom-and-pops into a predictable business model. Instead of offering one-of-a-kind experiences, these temporary stores usually copy the same layout and merchandise year after year.
What was once exciting and unexpected has become a formula designed more for profit than creativity.
When I think of Halloween, I envision everyone celebrating in their own ways: that one house down the street that builds an intricate maze on their front lawn filled with eerie fog and jump scares. Across the neighborhood, kids in creative costumes dash from door to door, while parents set up fire pits and pass out candy!
What I don’t want to see is every person celebrating Halloween in exactly the same way: buying the same decorations, the same costumes, and following the same trends pushed by big retailers. It soils the creativity that makes the holiday so much fun in the first place.
As the years go by, every holiday seemingly becomes more and more centered around consumerism. It’s become a fight over what you can buy rather than how you can celebrate.
Spirit Halloween is a store chain that has perfected its formula for taking over the spooky season: strategic marketing, convenient location placements, and trendy merchandise that revolves around the latest pop culture (and will likely go out of style in less than a month).
And while there are still corners of the store where originality shines, they’re often overshadowed by mass-produced costumes that feel more corporate than creative.
