The owner of a Florida Halloween store tells NR she can’t get the products she needs to capitalize on her busy season.
Stepping into the Red Headed Witches costume shop in the lead-up to Halloween, customers can expect to find shelves well stocked with wigs, masks, plastic weapons, costumes, and theater-quality makeup – seemingly everything needed for a night of trick-or-treating.
Crissy Barchers, on the other hand, can’t help but notice what’s missing.
Barchers is the owner of the Cape Coral, Fla.-based store, located fittingly inside a one-time funeral home. For the last two months, because of supply chain disruptions, she’s been struggling to fill her shelves with many of the season’s hottest products. Instead, she said, she’s filling them with what she can – more generic grim reapers, scarecrows, alien costumes.
“We can’t get Freddy Krueger. We can’t get anything from Scream. We’re having a difficult time getting Spider Man, Batman, Venom, Ghostbusters,” Barchers said. “It’s kind of those popular characters everybody knows and loves. That’s where we’re having difficulty.”
The ongoing supply chain disruptions are causing concerns among retailers and customers about potential product shortages during the Christmas season. But for Barchers this is make or break time, and the troubles she’s experiencing may foreshadow what other retailers will be dealing with over the next couple of months, the most important time of the year for an industry that’s also struggling with rising prices and a worker shortage.
After taking the first eight months of the year off, Barchers said she reopened her shop in September, looking forward to a strong Halloween season. It was around mid-September, when her biggest orders were supposed to arrive, that she realized she had a problem. Some orders were coming up 50 percent short. She only received a quarter of one big order, she said.
She thought she’d maximized her budget, but she was wrong. “We didn’t have enough selection for people, so we just kept saying, ‘There’s more coming. We have more coming.’”
She began to scramble, reaching out to suppliers she hasn’t purchased from in years to see if they might have anything available that her customers might want.
Barchers is not alone. Big box retailers nationwide stocked their Halloween shelves early this year, and saw their limited supplies move quickly, according to the Wall Street Journal. Some suppliers expect that many products they ordered won’t arrive until after Halloween.
Jon Gold, vice president of supply chain and customs policy with the National Retail Federation, said the shortages are being driven by a combination of increased demand, manufacturing delays, and supply chain disruptions driven by the global coronavirus pandemic. Despite the logistics issues, the federation is forecasting consumer spending on Halloween-related items to reach an all-time high of $10.14 billion this year, up from $8.05 billion in 2020.
The supply chain disruptions in the U.S. are the worst in decades. Demand for products, in part because of a surge in online shopping, is outpacing the supply of everything needed to move those products through the supply chain, Gold said.
Overseas production has been limited by COVID-19 restrictions. There is a shortage of shipping containers, and a shortage of space on ships. Ships are idling off the West Coast, waiting to unload products at backed-up ports. President Joe Biden is pushing California ports to operate 24-7, but only one of the seven terminals at the Port of Long Beach is operating 24-hours a day, and only Monday through Thursday, in part due to inflexible labor practices and union requirements. There’s also a truck driver shortage, a shortage of chassis that truckers need to move containers, and a shortage of workers at many warehouses.
“This is an ongoing challenge that many retailers have been looking at for a while now,” Gold said. “I think many retailers have tried to put mitigation strategies in place where either they’re bringing in product earlier, they’re looking at alternate ports – they’re not just relying on West Coast ports, looking at the East Coast, Gulf Coast. Some are using air freight. I think you’ve seen stories about the larger retailers that have basically chartered their own vessels to get space.”
For the most part, Halloween shipments are in, Gold said. What’s going to be here in time for that holiday is here. The delays now will impact the December holidays.
Gold said the current issues are showing the importance of making changes to develop “a truly 21st Century supply chain.” Some experts expect the disruptions to continue until at least mid-2022. When, exactly, consumers can go back to not having to think about the supply chain is “the $64,000 question that everybody is trying to figure out,” he said.
“Hopefully addressing the challenges we’re facing today, we won’t’ see these kinds of issues in the future,” Gold said. “We’re going to see disruptions in the future. Hopefully it’s not a global pandemic. … Hopefully we’re better aligned and in a better place that we can address them in a better manner so we don’t see the impact that we’re seeing today.”
Barchers at Red Headed Witches said some of the items she has on backorder are trickling in, hopefully in time for the last two weekends before Halloween. Because she’s an independent retailer, she suspects she’s having a harder time than bigger stores getting products.
“Sometimes I feel like, what do they even care what I placed,” she said, “because I’m not a priority, because my order is so miniscule.”
In November she’ll transition to selling Christmas goods and offering family photos with the Grinch and Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas. She’ll pack up for the year in January.
Despite the supply chain issues, Barchers is having a pretty good season so far, she said. Sales this year are up over 10 percent from 2019, the last Halloween before the pandemic.
“People who are coming in are still extremely enthusiastic,” she said. “I wouldn’t say it’s ruining anybody’s Halloween celebration. I feel like people are more open-minded to try something else.”