Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Some Astounding Halloween Facts

From the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE).
  1. An estimated $575.26 million total will be spent on Halloween pumpkins alone in 2018, according to Finder, at an average price of $3.89 per pumpkin. That will exhaust about 80 percent of the US pumpkin supply.
  2. An estimated 95 percent of Americans plan on buying candy during the Halloween season, spending a total of $2.6 billion. 
  3. Americans are projected to spend some $9 billion total on Halloween in 2018, according to the National Retail Federation. That’s a couple billion dollars more than was spent on federal elections in 2016.
  4. Americans will spend, on average, a record $87 per person on Halloween in 2018, according to The Balance. (Meanwhile, more than half of Americans don’t have enough money in savings to cover the cost of a $500 emergency.)
  5. A single business produces nearly half of all costumes worn during the Halloween season, Bloomberg News reports. The company? Rubies Costume Co., the world’s largest manufacturer and designer of costumes.
  6. The top five most popular candies during the Halloween season, according to CandyStore.com, are: 5) Starburst; 4) Reese’s Cups; 3) Snickers; 2) M&Ms; 1) Skittles. These five candy brands will sell 55,000 tons of candy (11 million pounds) during the Halloween season, according to The Daily Meal. Skittles alone will sell 3,487,101 pounds.
  7. Americans spend more money on costumes than any other Halloween expenditure ($3.2 billion). The most popular costumes in 2018? Adults: witch, vampire, zombie, pirate, and Avengers characters. Kids: A princess, random superhero, Batman, random Star Wars character, and witch.
Some of those number boggle my mind.  11 million pounds of just those five candy brands (in #6)?  3.5 Million pounds of Skittles alone?  Maybe it's because candy isn't a routine part of our lives, and with Precious Grand Daughter and family a thousand miles away, we're hardly around candy at all, but that's a jaw-dropping amount of candy.  The Daily Meal has an article on the 25 most popular candies for Halloween, ranging from licorice at #25 with a mere 17,000 pounds being sold to that 3.5 Million pounds of Skittles.  Although I counted in my head, from #25 to #6 added up to about another 11 million pounds of those candy brands, bringing the overall total close to 22 million pounds of candy being sold.


Halloween trick or treaters, from the FEE article.


4 comments:

  1. Last night, three grandsons (ages 9-4) managed to scoop up 32 pounds of candy in about two hours of trick-or-treating in their neighborhood. My daughter consolidated it and we put it on a scale at my suggestion. I called another daughter and her two sons (7 and 4) dredged up about twenty pounds. I don't know how much the three granddaughters came up with (9 to 2) but my sense is that the standard is about ten pounds per child - so the LL Clan can lay claim to harvesting on the order of EIGHTY POUNDS of candy.

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    1. 10 pounds per child kinda blows me away. They'll be rolling in candy for weeks with any amount of parental control.

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  2. No wonder Dentists endorse hallowen... (snark button depressed)

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  3. Regarding which candy is bought for Halloween; I buy two packages of about 200 pieces of candy each. We have close to 400 kids come by on Halloween night. Therefore whatever candy is in the pack is what I buy. If they had a different candy or a different brand I wouldn't know or care. So hint to candy makers it isn't preference of brand or specific type it is simply how much do I get and how much does it cost.

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