Today (Aug. 7) I walked into a Dollar General in Central Indiana and they were putting out the Halloween candy and decorations. No costumes in sight, but…
The last few years (I dunno about the COVID year) they’ve always put 'em out towards the end of August. Any hypotheses as to why DG is rushing the spooks?
Stale candy they’re trying to get rid of?
Cracker Barrel had had their Halloween crap on display for a couple of weeks. The dollar store has had Halloween candy out for at least that long. It’s going to be nasty by the end of October…
By the end of October it’ll be nothing but Santas and Snowmen…
'Round these parts it’ll be the end of September.
My local stores already have the Halloween candy out but they’re competing with the back-to-school stuff for shelf space. The Halloween stuff will be front-and-center by September 1 and by Halloween itself all the shelves will have been full of Xmas stuff for weeks. The Halloween candy will remain until Oct 31 (but only that morning, by late afternoon it will all be consigned to a pile in a couple of shopping carts stationed next to the entrances while wage slaves will be busy filling those recently-vacated shelves with more Christmas junk).
There’s a lot about Christmas I like. The crazy consumerism is something I can do without, and it’s taking up more and more of our cultural bandwidth every year.
Today, at Walgreens, in a part of town thick with low-income families and small children, the back-to-school display of goods was infiltrated with candy corn and candy pumpkins. Good ol’ marketing, hard at work and damn the parents who have to deal with the pleas.
The summer camps around here do a Halloween themed event at the end of the camp season. I’ve been told that’s why the stuff starts showing up in stores in August. This year I spotted them in late July, that’s just too much.
Stores have been advancing the holiday sales in order to make money. While stores have always been about making money, doing that has been… problematic this past year to year and a half. Between covid and supply line issues… well, if you’ve got it, put it on the shelf and hope you can keep it coming until the next change of holiday.
We still aren’t getting everything we order where I work.
Don’t look now, but its worse than you thought. That stuff is for Halloween 2022!
Halloween is the 2nd biggest spending holiday in the US. The Halloween specialty stores have opened.
StG
Yup, today at my grocery, now I have to wonder, how much of that stuff has been in storage since 2020 didn’t actually turn out the way we’d have liked.
Food with expiration dates, of course, shouldn’t be sold past that date, so not from 2020.
Other stores may do it differently, but anything seasonal that doesn’t sell past a certain date we don’t keep at the store. Sometimes it’s destroyed and sometimes we ship it back to corporate - I have no idea if they stash it in the corner of a warehouse until next year, send it back to the manufacturer, donate it to something, or send it to a landfill. They don’t tell us peons at the store level.
Hobby Lobby had their Christmas items out in July. The weekend of July 4th, Walmart had already cleared out their aisles that had summer items like coolers, tents, badminton sets, etc. and were stocking the shelves with back-to-school supplies. Last weekend, Walmart had candy corn out.
No wonder it seems like time flies.
With a craft store like Hobby Lobby, there’s at least some justification. Crafts might take a while to make, especially if you’re making gifts for multiple people, so you need to add that time on to when you get it into the customer’s hands. Wal-Mart, though? I got nuthin’.
My daughter, who works at a large grocery store, said the stock room is floor to top shelf Halloween as of Friday, but stock had been trickling in over the past few weeks. They usually reduce the school supply aisles by the end of August (school starts day after Labor Day), and come first day of school it’ll all be Halloween.
The local Walgreens seasonal aisle is already half school, half Halloween.
Michaels Crafts started putting out their Halloween decor almost a month ago. Not crafting supplies, but lights, displays, home decorations.
To be fair, I don’t mind it - Halloween is my favorite holiday.
However, the pumpkin spice crap already out everywhere can go away.
Interesting timing. I noticed a neighbor put a pumpkin on their porch sometime this weekend. I wouldn’t even know where to buy one right now.
I never could understand the appeal of that. I get the impression that certain foods and flavors become trendy and if you want to be part of the Cool Kid’s Club you’ll jump on whatever bandwagon is parked outside in the cultural parking lot. Remember 10-15 years ago when putting ranch dressing on every single fucking food imaginable was all the rage? I feel like pumpkin spice is sort of the same thing.
Of course I don’t like pumpkin, or pumpkin pie, so maybe that’s all it is.
My local supermarket has Halloween candy for two weeks now. I absolutely refuse to get it this early but I wonder how much that is bought now is consumed by the purchaser/family because it happens to be in the house rather than waiting to give it out on Oct 31st?
I went to get a new bathing suit in the days after July 4th. I found them…in the clearance section. Good for me in that I got a discount but it was less than halfway thru unofficial summer & well before many people go on vacation. What happens when one is planning on vacation in Aug only to find their old suit ripped/missing/too small? Never understood why retail clothes are about a full season too early. No, I’m not even considering a new winter jacket at this time.
I published a story online in Page & Spine called “Seasonal”, in which the protagonist kept complaining about this issue throughout the year in her supermarket. “(Holiday supplies) already?”
In August, she saw a large “Death” costume, and said, “Halloween stuuf already?” Turns out it was actually Death, come for her. “Already?”