Thread: Should there be a Halloween Shop?

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Ok since some places in the world including my town have Christrmas Shops open all year round should there be a Halloween one? I think there should we don't have any but I suppose the best we can get is the gift shop at Tahe Edinburgh Dungeon which I may of got a job there as being an actor but didn't get it http://www.thedungeons.com

I definitely agree there should be a Halloween shop open year round. You could even incorporate it into Christmas, a la Nightmare Before Christmas. Combining it with other holidays could be interesting...not to mention twisted, demented and disturbing. Can you imagine what you could do to a Thanksgiving turkey, a leprechaun and the Easter Bunny? For Arbor Day, your window display could be a bunch of burned trees.

I would SO want to own one of these stores....

Actually, we have one! Halloween Experience has a open-year-round warehouse and retail store in Las Vegas. Props, costumes, accessories, etc. Ok, I guess that's a little far to fly just for a shrunken head and a jar of body latex...

I think Halloween stores work in destination cities, where people would drop in while in town.

They would fail miserably in your average city, though. It would take a while for people to understand it even in the best markets.

I think maybe a good format is a "holiday store" where you can get holiday supplies all year for any major holiday. A 50,000 sf store would be awesome!

We kinda have one around here. it's called the Party Tree. They have halloween stuff out year round...mostly masks and those cheapo costumes...very little in the prop department. Not anything really to get any ideas out of. I think a year round Halloween shop could be done.

As ShadowMistress and wilbret said, could you imagine the possibilities of a combination shop. Think about it. 1 big store, as you walk in...Halloween on the left, Christmas on the right, Thanksgiving, St. Patty's, Valentines, and all the other holidays towards the back. Just one big Holiday shop. I think it could work well... Something about the size of a Wal-Mart.

If they ever did that... I would go into debt.

I'm really, REALLY obsessed with finding new stuff or things that can be misappropriated for Halloween.

Party City always has costumes, masks and accessories out. Just not HW stuff.

We have a store in our Mall that does seasonal changes. The store name is "Seasons" after all. They aren't very big though, and carry very liitle if anything in the way of props or costumes for ANY holiday.

I had this same dream at one time about owning a year around store for selling Lemax products. I looked into it briefly one monht and found I was looking to have to come up with close to $500,000 start up costs. Out of the question for me unfortunately. A year around store like you all are talking about, even with renting the building, would cost millions. Most people aren't willing to risk that these days without really, really great expectations of return on their investment.

SOmething along these same lines is I contacted a company one time about why they didn't release DVDs of the video of an old 1960's music show they owned the rights to. I found out they were looking at an up front investment of $200,000 (pay all of the artists featured on the shows), and had to guarantee at least 7500 units would be sold the first month. No wonder these record companies are just sitting on the old recordings. They can't afford to let them be re-released. Everybody wants their little piece, and it adds up big time after a while.

If you have a solid business plan, getting money is the easy part.

The hard part is running a retail store, and I would rather have bamboo shoots under my nails and my eyes sprayed with iodine than do that again. I was conned into starting up a retail store for a manufacturer that I worked for... it was a learning experience.

Hiring people for retail is a CONSTANT hassle. Inventory, taxes, lease hassles, rude customers, non-paying customers, minimum order lunacy from vendors, etc... just make it not that much fun. Mostly I hated that I could only trust a couple people, and even then I found out that they were jerking around and not taking it seriously. (surfing porn sites, 'borrowing' from the till, making errors in judgment, and so on).

I guess if you have family working for you, it would be okay. I don't think you have to pay for disability insurance or withhold social security for them, if they are immediate family.

we have one here out in the middle of nowhere called ALL ABOUT HALLOWEEN. have not been there yet though