The first buboe...

Should I be concerned? Well, obviously. But more specifically should I be concerned that a Spirit Halloween is going is moving in to my town? 

Ours is a vibrant, bustling downtown full of restaurants, shops
and for some reason a place where you can make your own candles.
Because people will buy anything when they're on vacation. Anything.

If you can think of a better use for three
hundred dollars I'd like to...huh? Oh, right.
Food, gas, insulin, literally anything else.

"A store that just sells nothing but Halloween costumes, animatronic witches, and garbage candy? That's great!" You undoubtably just cried. "After all, Halloween is a magical time of the year and easily the equal of Christmas or Valentine's Day. Why shouldn't there be a national chain store that exists solely to hawk Halloween-themed wares?" "But is it?" I reply. "Is it great? Ask yourself, where does one usually see Spirit Halloween stores?" "Why, at the mall." You respond. "Dead malls." I fire back. And with that, I'll stop with the dialogue thing. 

The ocean's not going to fill itself with plastic...

I don't begrudge anyone the joy of exchanging hard-earned money for plastic nonsense they'll throw out come November but...uh...actually, I'd kind of like to begrudge. I don't hate fun or anything, but do we, as a civilization really need more branded Avengers costumes and vampire contact lenses? Like the carbon footprint of shipping this junk across the Pacific just seems a little hard to justify when everything is so, you know, on fire.

If it were an animal, I think the
biological term would be scavenger.

But beyond environmental impact of the Halloween industry, there's something unnerving about these places from an economic perspective. The one going in downtown is filling a vacant storefront that, until the pandemic, was a family owned art supply store that had been around for decades. Once the Halloween store is gone, it will be vacant again. The landlord isn't rushing to fill the place because through the vagaries of tax loopholes, it's somehow cheaper to write off the vacancy rather than to take a risk on a new business. Because capitalism is gross.

And it all just folds into the general sense of dread that I think a lot of us have been experiencing these last few weeks...months...years. Yeah, really since say about late 2016. I think the feeling is called civilizational decline, which I realize is a lot to pin on a seasonal chain store, but at the same time I don't think I'm wrong.

Spirit Halloween is just the first buboe on the medieval peasant.