The Halloween Aisle, Part 3

Happy Halloween Eve! Family, work, and other responsibilities left me little extra time for updating the blog this month—my apologies!

However, the holiday has been on my periphery over the past few weeks. I actually stopped at CVS with my sons in early September to see what Halloween items were in stock. So here is this year's entry in my Halloween Aisle series.

First off, this was my first CVS visit specifically to evaluate its Halloween offerings. In my last two installments (see Part 1 and Part 2), I profiled the Halloween aisle at my local Walgreens. This time, it was plainly obvious that CVS, at least the store closest to me, had much less to offer. There were only a few packages of grease and cream Halloween makeup, and a couple of different fake tattoos. What was there seemed overpriced. 

For example, CVS is selling one 0.7-ounce tube of white cream makeup for $4.99 this year. Last year, Walgreens sold a $5.99 cream makeup kit that included a 0.75-ounce tube each of white and black cream makeup, along with three smaller tubes of red, green, and metallic makeup. Have prices seriously inflated that much in one year?

Cans of colored hairspray actually seemed more reasonably priced. Seeing these always brings back memories of dressing as the Joker, with sprayed-green hair, for Halloween in 1989. 

Unfortunately, the cream makeup, fake tattoos, and colored hairspray were the store's only available options for dressing up. Well, I take that back—there was one "ghost face" mask inspired by the Scream movie franchise. Almost all the other items in the Halloween aisle (really only half an aisle) were related to decorations. There were a couple of different pumpkin carving kits.

These kits with paint, stickers, and other push-in/stick-on applications allow younger children to decorate pumpkins without having to carve them. For the same age group, CVS also had a couple of Halloween-themed magic ink activity books.

The fake cobweb fluff—which we sometimes put up by our front porch for Halloween when I was a kid—seemed reasonably priced.

The next several photos show the miscellany of other Halloween items for sale—knick-knacks, candles, themed blankets and accent pillows, and candy buckets.

Here are a couple of animated Halloween decorations that the store was selling (please pardon my blurry photos). One item I didn't get a picture of was a skeleton hand that, with the push of a button, "walked" on its fingertips. My sons enjoyed trying that one.

At least in early September, CVS's selection of Halloween candy was small, compared with what Walgreens stocked in the past couple of years, though I've seen worse prices.

Judging by what's available near me, I would definitely choose Walgreens over CVS if those were my only local suppliers for Halloween costumes, makeup, decorations, and candy. Maybe CVS stores in other locations are better stocked. 

Even so, my sons and I enjoyed checking out the Halloween aisle that day, back when we were still anticipating the official arrival of autumn.

The Halloween Aisle, Part 2

It's a given that Walmart, Party City, and other big stores are going to have a wider variety of Halloween costumes than your local drug or grocery store will. However, when I was a kid, the drug store was usually our first stop when time came for costume shopping.

I wrote about this last year, in a post about the Halloween aisle of our local Walgreens. While heading out on some errands this morning with my eldest son, I decided to stop by there again, so that he could check out the Halloween aisle for himself.

The offerings were quite similar, particularly in the scarcity of costume items—though I admit that it's late in October and that there may have been more on the racks a month ago. Today there were only two masks: a skull face and an alien. 

There were several different packages of Halloween makeup—tubes of fake blood and creme makeup, oil crayon makeup, and a "Deluxe Makeup Kit" that included various pots and tubes of grease and creme makeup, as well as fake blood, "tooth out" and "fake scar," and several applicators. 

Hanging near the makeup kits were some clothing accessories—witch gloves, a pumpkin beanie, and a few different pairs of Halloween socks. Underneath those were decorations such as light-up jack-o-lanterns and strands of holiday lights, and also some classic-looking jack-o-lantern candy pails.

Other decorations included signs, skeletons, witches, ghosts, spiders, and cobwebs.

Some of the items weren't easily identifiable. I did spot some treat bags—though not the cool paper ones my mom used to get. 

The sweets heavily outweighed the costume and decoration offerings, though marked-up Halloween candy undoubtedly brings the bigger profit. I always enjoy seeing the holiday packaging.

The store had a better—though still slim—selection of costumes last year, but overall, the offerings were about the same. Not great, but certainly better than nothing. Next time, I might try CVS, less than a block away, or the Kroger across the street, to see what they have in stock. 

The Halloween Aisle

We didn't have a Spirit Halloween store near us when I was a kid.

At Halloween time, we had a few other options. We didn't have Walmart, but we had K-Mart. Then there was our local mall. There the Hallmark store usually had, in addition to its holiday greeting cards, a section of Halloween costumes and items close to the front of the store. I vaguely remember picking up a free Halloween costume catalog from Sears in the mid-1980s, though I don't recall ever buying anything Halloween-related there. Another mall staple, Spencer's Gifts, sold Halloween masks years before the company bought out the Spirit Halloween chain in 1999.

Although I remember Toys 'R Us primarily for its selection of magic tricks and kits—such as the Magic World of Blackstone Beginner's Magic Set—the store carried enough Halloween merchandise to publish its own annual costume catalog. And because I watched reruns of That's Incredible during the 80s, I also associated the store with the haunted Toys 'R Us in Sunnyvale, California.

For costumes, candy, decorations, and other Halloween paraphernalia, I mainly depended on the holiday aisle of our nearest drugstore, Sav-on Drugs. The selection was limited, though I didn't think so at the time. It was where I went when I needed a pot of green makeup, a cassette tape of sound effects, or a bag of candy corn.

One cassette tape that I'm pretty sure I bought at Sav-on was titled "Horror Sounds of the Night." I used the tape as the soundtrack for numerous homemade radio shows and videos over the years, including my own "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" movie. My tape copy was defective, as much of it had a screechy sound that was obviously not intentional. Here is someone else's good transfer of the tape on YouTube:

Another fun find from the mid-1980s was the Create-A-Face Complete Makeup Kit, which included six colors of makeup paint, a tube of vampire blood, glow-in-the-dark monster fangs, "icky teeth," an eyepatch, face adhesive, various "special effect pieces" like bullet holes and a stitched wound, and a waxy "blend" that supposedly helped hide the edge of the effect pieces (it didn't). Though the kit looks pretty underwhelming in hindsight, it seemed like the stuff of professionals when I was a kid.

There are no more Sav-on Drug stores as I remember them (most became CVS Pharmacies). So yesterday I stopped by the Halloween aisle at my local Walgreens to buy some candy to give out (in one week!) and to see what other things they had on the pegboard racks.

The costume selection was a bit sad. Space was severely limited by the Christmas merchandise, already taking up half the aisle. And there were no audio offerings. Unfortunately, the days of sound effects albums and cheesy cover versions of "Monster Mash" on CDs are long gone.

There were, however, glow sticks, several packages of grease and cream makeup, fake fangs, and tubes of vampire blood—all similar to the kinds sold when I was a kid. These would do just fine for any kid planning a homemade monster movie.

At the very least, there was a decent selection of candy. And this store had some pretty good discounts. (After all the markdowns I came away with several bags for $15.) For some things, you can still depend on the Halloween aisle.

Toys R Us Halloween Catalog

CVS Weekly Advertisement

Kmart Weekly Advertisement

Walgreens Weekly Advertisement

When I was a kid, I really enjoyed thumbing through the newspaper in October to see Halloween candy and costumes advertised in weekly flyers for drug and grocery stores. Though these weekly ads would ordinarily be of no interest to me, it gave me great pleasure seeing how the usual, mundane printings were "dressed up" for the holiday.