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Halloween retailers scaring up business
Mr. Pumpkin Head at the Big Stuff Booth at the Halloween Costume and Party Show in Las Vegas in March 2009.
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TEXT OF STORY
Kai Ryssdal: Forget that Bernie Madoff mask that's topping the charts as the scariest Halloween costume this year. How about the New American Consumer. You know, the frugal shopper who's spending about 15 percent less on Halloween than he did last year. That's spooky news for purveyors of pumpkins and creators of costumes. That doesn't mean retailers aren't putting their best mask forward, as Cash Peters found out in Las Vegas earlier this year.
CASH PETERS: I didn't know this, but there's a trade show each year devoted entirely to Halloween.
Seriously, Eileen Oswald handles their PR.
EILEEN Oswald: People come to a Halloween show to buy costumes, to buy props, to buy makeup. A million different products to celebrate the season.
Amazing, really, given the season lasts just one day.
Dorothea Puccini sells Halloween masks.
DOROTHEA Puccini: It's actually one of the biggest holidays in the United States in terms of merchandising.
PETERS: Yeah, but what about the other 364 days when people aren't interested in Halloween.
Puccini: Well, you know what, there's a select group of people that are interested in Halloween all year.
Yeah, most of them heavily medicated I am guessing. Oh, and if you are wondering why Dorothea sounded slightly muffled, she was dressed as a vulture. But this isn't the place to come if you are squeamish. Everywhere you look, there are people selling severed limbs in bulk or a small tasteful mound of skulls for your front yard -- $80 wholesale or for 300 bucks, a life-sized private that shakes.
Like that. Shaking is taking over from fiendish cackling as the new big thing. Dave Gottschalk of Gag Studios.
DAVE Gottschalk: This is Captain Floggam. He is kind of the nasty version of Johnny Depp. A lot of people come in and say, gee, he kind of looks like Keith Richards.
PETERS: There isn't an exhibit in this entire show that doesn't look like Keith Richards, I have to say.
Gottschalk: That's true.
As always of course, there's all kinds of interesting stuff. Bill Shay sells that other Halloween staple, the disemboweled corpse.
BILL Shay: We sell bags of intestines.
PETERS: What am I gonna do with it?
Shay: Well, you are gonna hang it in places around your house, create a Halloween scene for the kids.
PETERS: And you are not being called by the social services.
Shay: Oh no, not at all.
PETER: What do you sell?
BRUCE GOLDSTEIN: We sell a candy product. It's called Pucker Powder.
This is Bruce Goldstein of Creative Concepts.
PETERS: And what's Pucker Powder?
GOLDSTEIN: Pucker Powder is basically, if I can say this, it's like a make-your-own pixie stick, but it's not a pixie stick because that's a Nestle product.
PETERS: So basically this is some kind of counterfeit?
GOLDSTEIN: No, not at all, not at all.
PETERS: How many lawsuits so far?
GOLDSTEIN: Zero. Not a one.
PETERS: Oh really.
GOLDSTEIN. Why would we? Because it's Pucker Powder.
Oh, of course it is.
Actually though, counterfeiting is a serious threat to a show like this. Bill Shay, the intestine guy, also sells pirate skeletons with flashing eyes. And he claims manufacturers come over from China, take his ideas for pirates, then return home and pirate them.
SHAY: They're king in China of being able to reproduce something someone else already made. Not the original ideas of any kind. I heard people say that at this rate China is going to take over the world. They'll never take over the world. They'll always need someone to tell them what to do.
PETERS: Nothing racist about that, then.
Shay: It's not a racist thing. It's culturally.
Wow, that's serious accus...Oh, look who's back. It's Dorothea again, only this time she was wearing a big purple bug-eyed mask with feathers.
PETERS: What is she now?
GUY: She's a gaylien.
PETERS: She's gay, and she's an alien.
GUY: That's right.
Puccini: I'm gaylien.
PETERS: You're a gaylien.
Puccini: Yes, showtime, showtime.
PETERS: Jazz hands. And what makes that mask so gay?
Puccini: I just think it's the personality behind it.
Oh yeah, or maybe it's just plain ol' homophobia masquerading as fun. Who knows. Anyway I was honestly shocked at how popular Halloween is. According the show's PR woman, Eileen Oswald, this may be one industry that may well be recession proof.
Oswald: People dress their pets now. So you have pet outfits, you have children's outfits.
PETERS: People are pathetic, aren't they really?
OSWALD: It's anything for a bit of fantasy.
PETERS: So what will you be going as this year?
OSWALD: With my particular personality, a witch suits me just fine.
PETERS: You are extremely difficult, I have to be honest.
She was. In Las Vegas, I'm Cash Peters for Marketplace.
RYSSDAL: Cash Peters is a humorist whose latest book is "Naked in Dangerous Places."
I enjoy Marketplace's reporters because they manage to be entertaining as well as substantively informative. I was looking forward to an intelligent and amusing take on an inherently interesting topic -- in other words, the type of reporting that I tune in to Marketplace to hear. However, this "humor" piece was so full of gratuitous mockery and mean-spirited jabs at its (apparently) good-natured interviewees that it failed on both counts. Cash Peters does a real disservice to himself, to your program, and to public radio in general.
Cash Peters is not a humorist, he's just an idiot. His material is never original, and it's always the same: "Look at those people who are not behaving exactly as I think people should behave. Isn't that funny?" His inability to suppress his laughter at his own cleverness just points up how not clever it really is. It's a lot easier to read the transcripts than it is to listen to Peters attempt to sound funny. The exchange with Puccini is absolutely classic Cash Peters not-funny.
I thought you had dropped him. I'm really sorry to see him back. He drags the show down.
I listen to marketplace everyday and if I could spend every day of the rest of my life with someone it would be Kai Rysdall. Nonetheless, after listening to this piece I am very dissapointed someone like Cash Peters would be on marketplace. Crass is not necessarily funny, and thus often just plain negative and rude. I am all for making fun of Americans but at the end of the day he's not why I want to listen to marketplace.
Julie Kelso
This story really turned my stomach--and not because of the descriptions of gruesome Halloween toys. I was strongly put off by Peters's backhanded asides during the segment; these jabs rang all the more false because the people he interviewed, though maybe not well-spoken, didn't seem especially eccentric.
I was also baffled by his initial insistence that there is no such thing as a Halloween season. While I lived in the U.K. (where I assume Peters is from), this is certainly the case--Halloween is a fun excuse for adults to wear costumes and go to parties. In America, many people decorate their homes, schools, and offices in a Halloween theme weeks beforehand. Peters has been contributing to Marketplace for a long time now, it seems strange that he has not yet learned the habits of the country he reports on.
What an unbelieveably rude piece. While I was taken aback by the comments from Bill Shay about the Chinese, I was also stunned by the "heavily medicated" line from the reporter, as well as by his assumption that someone dressed up like a "gaylien" was homophobic and not simply making into costume a relatively common word... see UrbanDictionary.com for some definitions and usage examples. More to the point, the derision and contempt in the reporter's tone throughout the whole piece made it clear that he was not even making an attempt to understand this community. Ugh. Not something I'd ever like to hear more of. Certainly won't be buying his books.
so, marketplace and cash peters, are the mentally ill truly the last segment of the population it's okay to make sly digs at? most of us know people who are on meds -- or know people who should be. given that complying with a medication routine is an issue in this area, i don't think little comments like the one below do much to help anyone. it didn't do anything for an otherwise fine story; i was so disturbed by it that i went to this page to say this and only listened with half an ear to the rest. sincerely, rachel carpenter
"Puccini: Well, you know what, there's a select group of people that are interested in Halloween all year.
Yeah, most of them heavily medicated I am guessing. "
