Halloween Consumer Spending & Financial Crisis Impact

Halloween 🎃 is a holiday with ancient roots that has evolved over time into a day of activities such as attending Halloween costume parties, carving pumpkins into jack-o’-lanterns, lighting bonfires, apple bobbing, visiting haunted attractions, playing pranks, telling scary stories, and watching horror films. The holiday originates in the Celtic festival of Samhain, and was later influenced by the Roman festivals of Feralia and Pomona. Halloween was brought to America by European immigrants, and the tradition of trick-or-treating probably dates back to the early All Souls’ Day parades in England. Today, Americans spend an estimated $6 billion annually on Halloween.

5 Facts About Halloween for 2022 🤓

• 34% of parents think 13 or 14 is old enough to trick-of-treat alone.
• 86% of parents admit to stealing candy from their kids.
• $5.82: Average retail price of a pumpkin (up 13% from 2021).
• $300+ Million: Annual revenue from ticket sales for haunted attractions, 80% of which are run by charities.
• 72% of Americans say they would consider purchasing a haunted house to live in (but less than half would pay full market value for it).

In short, Halloween is a holiday celebrated in many countries on October 31st. It is the eve of All Hallows’ Day, also known as All Hallows’ Eve, All Saints’ Eve, or Allhalloween. Besides it is a time to remember the dead, including saints, martyrs, and all the departed. Overall Halloween is the occasion for supernatural-themed parties 👻. The name is a shortened form of Allhallowtide (“hallowed evening”).

We built a Noteable data notebook to look into some trends solely with no-code visualization.

We see that Consumers Spending in Billions increased steadily year-over-year apart from 2010, 2013, 2016, and 2021. We found that the % of households celebrating Halloween seems correlated to the total spending.

To better understand this potential correlation we faceted the data against the total spending, and we see that from the survey the % of households buying costumes every year is the most correlated to the overall spending. The spending on Candy is the least impacted by any change in overall spending.

We confirmed the trend by looking at the time-series data that shows what the consumers are spending their money on for Halloween. Candy is steady with a median of 95.50%.

Now what’s even more interesting is to compare the % of households celebrating Halloween v. the % of households who are buying customers every year. You’d see that during the financial crisis of 2007 and the 2020 and 2021 pandemic there is a cross-over. Consumers apparently still bought costumes but didn’t celebrate as much.

To conclude if we use a Sunburst to see where consumers spent their money, we realize that most spending has been for 2022 at what we called Big Box stores and Small Businesses. Halloween seems to be one of the last survivors of the E-commerce trend!