Halloween items already...

Still more than three months till the scariest night of the year, but you can expect items starting to come in within this month and the next month or two, including where I work. We have yet to receive halloween items, but I expect to see them sometime this month. However, last week on the last day of June I saw Halloween items already displayed at a local thrift store run by the town's hospital. The items for sale were much like those I get in my store, nothing like what this blogger wrote last October:

The Halloween selection at thrift stores is always a little depressing. There’s the beatup and never used vampire makeup kit still clinging to the backing card. There’s the 342 baby costumes of Winnie the Pooh and a bunny rabbit. There’s 14 VHS copies of the Olsen twins’ Double Double Toil and Trouble. There is the odd Minnesota State Fair cloth cowboy hat that was thrown in with the Halloween crap. And then there’s the school-age kids who are either poor or just have bad parents, dispiritedly trying to find some sort of passable costume that will fit.

Interesting scenarios. I'm now compelled to look at the Halloween selection at the thrift stores later this year, as the holiday nears. What I saw last week doesn't even come close to what the quote above says. Nothing mentioned above or anything close to it was at the store. However, when the items start pouring into thrift stores, I almost half expect to see similar, if not identical, scenarios. From past years, I recall seeing used store-bought costumes with pieces missing, e.g., children's Superman costumes missing the cape or Ninja costumes missing the plastic sword. And I've seen graduation robes thrown in among the used costumes. These actually could make good costumes, e.g., the black robes could be easily used for a witch, the red ones for devils, white ones for angels, and perhaps a Renaissance dress from a navy blue or emerald green robe? I actually used this idea one year, making the half-devil/half angel from halves of a white and a red robe.

More on this in a few months...