It's never too early for Halloween

Halloween is more than a month away, but retailers are already busy scaring up business. The nation’s leading discount chains began hauling out Halloween decorations and merchandise weeks ago.

“We’ve found our customers begin thinking about Halloween shortly after Labor Day,” said Karen Burk, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer.

At Target stores, Halloween products went on display in early September. On the Target Web site, www.target.com, Halloween merchandise has been available even longer, since Aug. 1.

The Halloween Bootique, in its second year at the Promenade Shops at Briargate, has them all beat: It opened in mid-July.

There may not be a lot of people thinking about ghosts and goblins during the dog days of summer, but there are some, said store manager Dani Adams.

“We sold enough to make it worth the company’s while,” she said.

Early sales were mostly children’s costumes, she said — kids wanting to make sure they got the costumes they wanted. Business began heating up this month.

“The last two weeks, we’ve noticed a big increase in sales,” Adams said.

The Spirit Halloween Superstore at Chapel Hills Mall opened in early September. It was the first of three Spirit stores in the Springs to open.

With fall weather settling in and October around the corner, business is starting to pick up, said Mindy Levinson, assistant manager of the Chapel Hills store.

“It was running a little slow for a while.”

At Zeezo’s, a costume and magic store in downtown Colorado Springs, business is running about 25 percent ahead of this time last year, said vice president Jessica Modeer. Halloween sales account for about a third of the shop’s business, she said.

The National Retail Federation predicts a challenging Christmas holiday season for retailers, with consumers beset by a weak housing market and other economic worries. But Modeer said Halloween sales traditionally are largely immune to such concerns.

“Whenever the economy is good, we do good,” she said. “And whenever the economy is bad, we still do pretty well. People want to get out and they want to have fun, and even if they are having a hard time, they want to get out and play and forget about their problems.”

Customers start coming in to look for Halloween costumes the second week of September, Modeer said. Such early interest in the spookiest of holidays has not gone unnoticed by marketers and media companies.

It wasn’t too long ago that magazines waited to run Halloween ads and articles until their November issues, which are published in October. Now, readers of the October issues of magazines such as Country Living, Better Homes and Gardens and Woman’s Day will find them replete with Halloween trappings.

“Halloween is like Christmas in the sense that people like to start celebrating it very early,” said Jane Chesnutt, editor in chief at Woman’s Day in New York. “If you drive through suburbia near the end of September, the Halloween decorations will be out in full force.”

Among the marketers shouting “Boo” well before Halloween are Hallmark Cards, Lenox, Mars, the Popcorn Factory and Advil analgesic, sold by Wyeth Consumer Healthcare.

“Pain can be scary,” advises the Advil ad, which is decorated with characters including a witch. “But don’t be frightened. Advil works wherever you hurt.”

WHAT YOU’RE SPENDING

According to the National Retail Federation’s Halloween Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey:

$64.82 The average amount those surveyed plan to spend on Halloween, up from $59.06 a year ago.

$23.33 The average consumers plan to spend on Halloween costumes, including kids’ and pets’ costumes.

$5.07 billion Estimated Halloween spending for 2007 in the U.S.

WHAT ARE THE HOT COSTUMES THIS HALLOWEEN?

“Pirates are still very, very big,” said Jessica Modeer, vice president of Zeezo’s.

Maybe not as big as princesses, though. According to a survey conducted by BIGresearch for the National Retail Federation, the top choice for kids’ costumes this year is a princess (10.7 percent), followed by Spider-Man (4.8 percent), pirate (4.7 percent), witch (4.2 percent) and fairy (2.8 percent).

One-third of adults in the survey also will dress in costume for Halloween. Their top choices are witch (16.9 percent), pirate (3.8 percent), vampire (3.1 percent), cat (2.5 percent) and princess (2.2 percent.)