Halloween is coming and in that Spirit I share this:
There was a big knitting and sewing type of store near me that was open for as long as I can remember. It closed forever a few months ago. Then sitting empty with the windows covered up and the signs removed and a for sale/rent sign out front.
I think you can guess what has just opened up in that space in the last day or so. Personally, I could live without such things.
What’s happening where you live?
There was a grocery store that my ex-husband worked at when we were dating that closed a while back and re-opened as a Big Lots. The Big Lots closed sometime recently and the storefront just re-opened as a Spirit Halloween.
I mean, better a pop-up store than a completely vacant storefront. OK, come November, it’ll probably be vacant again, but maybe a Christmas popup will take its place, and either way, that’s still a few months more for the owners of the building to find a new permanent tenant.
Pop-up shops like Spirit are the grease that lubricates the retail real-estate engine.
So many stores are closing around here. It’s kinda sad. So I guess, ‘better than nothing’ is well, better than nothing.
A quick check of the Spirit website shows most stores in the Bay Area are opening this week. “Summerween” is apparently a thing now and big retailers have been rolling out their offerings for almost a month now. Haunted House attractions are also starting to open up across the country.
So is the OP’s point about Halloween itself, about seasonal storefronts, about the retail season for holidays getting longer all the time, or something to do with general retail decay wherever on Earth they live?
Looking at Spirit’s website, the closest one to me is about to open in a former CVS drugstore location; most of the other ones nearby are in former Party City locations (a party-supply retail chain which went out of business late last year).
The former CVS location is just down the street from a big-box retail space which has been largely empty for years. When I moved here, 35 years ago, it was a Venture (a local discount department store chain, similar to Wal-Mart). When Venture died in '98, it was empty for years, before re-opening as a Kmart. It operated as a Kmart for a while, but as Kmart circled the drain around 2018, it was closed again, and remained empty for years, before being used as a large-scale COVID vaccination site by Cook County in 2021. That facility shut down by late that year, and it’s again been empty since.
One longer-term repurposing I’ve been seen for empty retail spaces is now churches: there are a number of former store sites which have become churches, particularly small, independent, conservative churches. Interestingly, the stand-alone building which my family built in 1979, as a True Value hardware store, was repurposed as a church about a decade ago, after serving as a roller rink for several decades.
I’ve never been in a Spirit Halloween store, being too old for the holiday. I am slightly curious to see what they look like, so I may stop by one this year. It is impressive how they are able to set up those hundreds of stores each year and tear them down after.
I’ve been in one once, about a decade ago. They liberally repurpose the shelving and displays from whatever now-dead retailer was formally in the space (in my case, an old Toys R Us), and just hang/shelve things where they can.
I probably live 80 miles as the crow flies from the nearest Spirit Halloween. And besides that, if I’m driving that far, I might as well just go to St. Louis’ not-popup Halloween retailer, The Dungeon.
I went to one last week that was in a mall. We killed some time looking at the audio-animatronic displays, which were pretty gory and graphic.
They often have some cool Disney Haunted Mansion merchandise.
What age makes one too old for the holiday?
They don’t repurpose the entire store. They’ll just throw a barrier of shelves/curtains around to turn a closed up 125,000 sq foot Target into a 2,500 sq ft space large enough for a half dozen shelves and racks of kid’s costumes, that many again of adult costumes, bind of plastic accessories and all sorts of stuff to put in and outside of the home. Plus registers and whatnot. Point being, don’t go into your old Party City and expect to find it totally decked out in Halloween stuff now.
We used to have a vacant Toys R Us that was a reliable location for Spirit and whatever version the Christmas store is named. I was actually disappointed when it got converted into a gym since I never need that gym but did hit up the seasonal shops yearly.
The same thing. A JoAnn’s closed and now Spirit Halloween is taking residence until November. It sits next to a now-vacant Rite Aid.
The building used to be a proper mall with Rite Aid, Sears, and Macy’s as anchor stores with a proper selection of storefronts inside the mall. A decade or so ago they reconfigured the entire building, closing off all the interior retail space and adding several outside storefronts and shops and turning the building into what is essentially a weirdly shaped strip mall. Now several of those stores – like the JoAnns and the Rite Aid and Claire’s and of course Macy’s and Sears – are gone.
We had a Big Lots. Closed now. Several Subways and a KFC closed in the past 6 months. A Round Table Pizza just closed. An Albertsons closed and their parking lot is now home to about 30 dilapidated RV’s and even more tents.
We did get a WinCo a couple of years ago and it seems to be thriving.
Do you live in a small town in western PA? Because the exact same thing happened here.
There is a strip mall about 2 miles from me, where I go several times a week, as it’s where my primary grocery store is located. It’s on a corner, and the strip mall section is set back from the street; the “pads” along the streets have primarily been home to fast-food restaurants. It is nearly always a very busy location.
As of a couple of years ago, there were eight restaurants in that location. The Subway, which was in the main strip, died during COVD; in the past month, the KFC, which had been in that “pad” location for 35 years, closed, as did a mom-and-pop Chicago-style hot dog / Italian beef / pizza restaurant in the main strip, which had also been there for 30+ years.
Still surviving are a McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, and Dunkin’ on the outer pads, and a sit-down mom-and-pop Bohemian restaurant in the strip.
This year our local Spirit Halloween store is in a JoAnn fabrics store that closed earlier this year. I don’t think the Spirit store has ever been in the same location two years in a row.
Also, less than a week after Labor Day and the neighbors across the street a couple houses down already have a lawnful of giant inflatable Halloween decorations out. I told my wife “I can top that. I’m going to put Christmas lights up this weekend!” 
All that, I suppose.
I don’t wear sunglasses anymore.
I’ll have to go looking for Halloween pop-up stores around here.
We had a raggedy Walgreens that closed ~8 years ago. It’s next to a groc store that’s been teetering on the edge but is still here. It’s a Winn-Dixie and their Corporate has been underinvesting in FL for a decade or so now and has recently sold all the FL stores to Aldi. Nobody has wanted to rent the dead Walgreens next to the dying WD, so it’s been a reliable Halloween & Xmas pop-up and nothing else the other 9 months.
In a different direction we’ve got a CVS that died about 2 years ago. It too looked like death for 5 years before shutdown. Store still vacant. Might become a pop-up.