Spirit Halloween gets into the Christmas spirit

Spirit Halloween is testing the Christmas holiday waters, with plans to convert 10 of their Spirit Halloween stores into Spirit Christmas stores for the 2024 holiday shopping season. This move makes a lot of sense – Spirit Halloween is already securing short-term leases on more than 1,500 locations throughout the United States, so who not simply extend the leases for an additional 2 months to serve the Christmas season as well? If the tests prove successful, we anticipate seeing orange and black “Spirit Halloween” banners converted into red and green “Spirit Christmas” banners in early November each year.

Annual holiday expenditures are not chump change. The National Retail Federation estimates that 2024 Halloween expenditures will reach $11.6 billion, with $3.8 billion of that spent on costumes. And part of the beauty of Halloween expenditures is that no one wants to wear the same costume two years in a row, making this a recurring expenditure. Christmas décor expenditures are also significant – of the estimated ~$980 billion that will be spent for the 2024 Christmas season, the National Retail Federation estimates that 29%, or ~$280 billion, will be spent on food and decorations. I don’t anticipate Spirit getting into perishables, but the decoration business opportunity alone is sizable.

Pop-up stores have been around for some time. In the early 2000s, retailers and manufacturers would use them to generate excitement for a new product launch. Target opened the Target Boat on the Chelsea Pier near the Meatpacking District in New York in 2002, physical presence in Manhattan. And Christmas pop-up stores are not new, either. Hickory Farms is now primarily an on-line and catalog store, but in their heyday had over 1,000 seasonal stores and kiosks selling food baskets for the holidays.

One of the fortunate coincidences of timing is that Christmas is less than two months after Halloween, so there is little or no down time between the two holidays. But could this be only the tip of the iceberg? Will Spirit Christmas be followed by Spirit Presidents Day, Spirit Valentine, Spirit Independence Day, and right back into Spirit Halloween? One suspects that landlords might get a little nervous about large quantities of explosives in the shopping centers for the July 4^th holiday.