Your Halloween Superstore Proprietor Urges You to Buy Local

Turge SprickmanNo one knows the hustle and bustle of the Halloween season more than yours truly. From August 31st to October 31st, we turn suburban blight into suburban bright! Boy, I bet you sure were sad when those Circuit Cities and Toys R Uses you once used to fritter your weekends away became hollowed-out husks between so many strip malls. Well, for three months out of the year, we act as the temporary souls for these retail corpses, and give you a chance to relive the memories of past shopping trips. You know that wall with festive, pre-packaged costumes like "drunk Supreme Court Justice nominee" and "sexy orange hockey mascot"? If you squint hard enough, you can almost make out where your parents bought you your first bike!

But all is not well in Halloweentown, as the famous movie "The Nightmare Before Christmas" once posited. It seems that in recent years, people have opted for the comforts of their home over the sheer ambience of a Halloween Superstore. And in a sense, I get it. Why, a man paid to drop off a 40-pound sack of candy corn at your door is one of the miracles of the modern world and also why we fought in all of those wars. But this sheer convenience comes at a cost. When you order "online," do you get to weigh your options between the various bags in front of you, scanning for defects and rare clusters of what we in the biz call "corn kings"? Not a chance. The poor warehouse worker who stuffs your box will be too wrapped up in planning the next time they can sneak away to urinate in a bottle to give a damn about your corn-related needs.

And that brings us to the many colorful characters who work at our Halloween Superstores. Many of our customers are surprised when they walk away from one of our locations with a new friend, or at the very least, someone who won't stop asking for their phone number. You may not even know the name of the postal service carrier who delivers those forty pounds of candy corn to your door, but if you come to our Market Street location, you'll be sure to remember the name of the man who brings it to your car. That's because it'll usually be Gus, a one-armed veteran with colorful language and even more colorful thoughts on where certain groups of people should live. We Halloween Superstores love giving seasonal, at-will employment to those who society won't give second chances to just because they've already messed up their sixth through eighth chances. My motto is, if you're sober enough to stay on your feet for 10 hours a day, you're sober enough to get paid in company scrip.

Many of you have looked upon the skeleton-like visage of Jeff Bezos and assumed he was one of our kind. I can assure you he is not. While his many warehouses have become fairly accurate representations of hell, we Halloween Superstores are more in favor of the playful version of horror, with ghosts, witches, and the occasional goblin. Our employees urinate in the toilet as god intended, or the coffee can in the corner of the break room when some prankster fills the bowl with plastic spiders even though our employee handbook strictly outlines that this is not funny. And for our employees who can't afford the generous sandwich offers from a nearby Subway, they are free to take one (1) handful of irregular gummi worms from the big box out back while on break. Sometimes, these employees are even treated to a bit of exercise when they're forced to fight off the family of raccoons intent on keeping their kind alive for generations with our generous supply of gummi.

Again, I must implore that you think of your Halloween Superstore friends if you're on the brink of turning to online this season. God knows we need that money to live off of for the next nine months after the perverts and sickos at the Christmas Superstores chase us out of there on November 2nd. May God help you if you so much as darken their doorstep with the innocent request of wanting to dress up as a giant tampon.

– Turge Sprickman