How early Halloween is changing retail

Halloween season is now starting in the spring, and it’s set to cause seismic shifts in the retail landscape.

If you lived in the Boston in 1970s and 80s, you knew it was Halloween time when legendary local rock station WBCN would begin playing "It’s Halloween" by cult band The Shaggs at the beginning of October. In the years since, retail promotions that start appearing in August have signaled the return of spooky season.

However, retailers are now getting an increasingly early jump on what is becoming a major consumer spending event. Major chains including Big Lots, Home Depot, Lowe’s and  Party City have been launching Halloween promotions as early as April. 

[READ MORE: Home Depot gets early jump on Halloween — online]

Let’s take a closer look at a few ways the emergence of Halloween as a six-month shopping season is disrupting the retail ecosystem.

Inventory

A pushback in the Halloween shopping period requires retailers to rethink their inventory planning. This includes ordering extra stock of products that are typically carried all year such as candy (on top of what might already be an expanded candy assortment due to the Easter holiday), as well as early orders for special seasonal items like costumes and decorations.

In addition to creating warehouse space and enabling extra shipments, early Halloween inventory also requires retailers to keep track of additional SKUs and possibly cut back on competing inventory for concurrent seasonal events, such as Easter as well as back-to-school.

CPG suppliers also face the prospect of having to produce extra, and early, batches of products such as candy bars and party favors. As more retailers jump on the early Halloween bandwagon (see more below), this could lead to product shortages and/or price inflation.

Promotions

Most retailers have followed the same basic promotional calendar for a long time, with some pressure from the increasing number of high-visibility sales extravaganzas that keep popping up. 

However, the emergence of Halloween as a shopping season that may start as early as April instead of the August/September timeframe will also require retailers to rethink their promotional and merchandising strategies. Advertising, site and app messaging and design, and store displays all have to be reconfigured to reflect the longer duration of Halloween promotions.

Retailers will also have to adjust pricing strategies, and again balance Halloween promotions with other spring and summer seasonal campaigns and sales events. Store and to a lesser extent website space is finite, meaning a shelf full of Halloween items will send other products to the back room or discount bin.

Follow the leader

Retail is a "fast follower" industry at heart. While digitally native startups are increasingly serving as the source of new ideas and strategies, for the most part dominant players set the trends, with smaller competitors following suit once success is demonstrated.

As previously mentioned, a number of major retailers are hopping on the early Halloween trend, and inevitably more smaller retailers will follow. This creates a self-fulfilling “snowball effect” which has recently been seen in the emergence of Prime Day becoming an industrywide mid-summer sales event and Black Friday promotions occurring in October.

Early Halloween is already well on its way to becoming an industry norm and shows no signs of slowing down. Vampires and ghouls who prefer dark and gloom will have to adjust to the bright, sunny weather.