Halloween Spending: The Price of Fright
The spookiest time of year is back. The
end of October brings the opportunity to spend lots of money on a few hours of
frightful frolicking.
Bankrate set out to
gauge the price of fright by tracking the cost of a basket of holiday items.
The items include decorations, candy, pumpkins and kids' costumes. The index
was assembled by pricing each item across six retailers. The prices from six
vendors were averaged to find the typical cost.
Having a hauntingly
good time Oct. 31 can cost a pretty penny, but beware: Economics can barge in
when you least expect it.
Costly costumes
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Like trick-or-treating, Halloween costumes were a 20th
century invention born out of necessity.
"For about 30 years, Halloween was taken over by
pranksters. By the '30s, pranks were causing cities millions of dollars of
damage. They considered banning Halloween in many cities, but instead parents
got together and came up with party ideas for kids, and a lot of them involved
dressing up and costuming," Morton says.
"There were things called house-to-house parties.
Because it was the Great Depression and everyone was so poor, each house would
fund a different part of the party, and that's one of the things that could
have led to trick or treating as well," she says.
Bankrate's Halloween research found that the price of
a kids costume today is an average of $29.60, sans accessories. Halloween
costumes don't tend to appreciate in cost with inflation, according to Mark
Bietz, vice president of marketing at HalloweenCostumes.com.
Prices go up "as manufacturing prices increase
along with competition. Typically, this isn't being passed along to the
consumer. Retailers are just taking slimmer margins," he says. To be sure,
some of the pricier costumes may require buying parts separately, so they don't
seem to be too expensive.
"Some big-box retailers will remove specific
parts of a costume in order to bring down the price point, such as a boot top,
for instance," says Bietz. "Also, costumes that are made from a
specific license will be higher due to the costs associated with the licensor."
If you want to be Batman for Halloween, it will cost a
lot more than simply going as a man dressed as a bat.