128 - Why We Happily Overspend on Halloween 🎃 (The Psychology + Money Stats)

Why do we spend billions on one spooky night?
This episode traces Halloween’s evolution—from Samhain and Roman festivals to All Hallows’ Eve—then flips the mask to reveal the behavioral psychology behind today’s $13B spend. 

We unpack:

• 🎃 Origins to Modern Mashup: Samhain → Roman Feralia & Pomona → All Saints/All Souls → American trick-or-treat
• 💵 Follow the Money: Costumes, décor, candy, parties; average spend per celebrant; why the total keeps hitting records
• 🧠 Psych Drivers: Nostalgia, social proof, sanctioned escapism, scarcity, and why fear = dopamine (aka paid thrills)
• 🧪 Marketing Playbook: Limited drops, seasonal urgency, “keep up with the neighbors,” and pet costumes (yes, really)
• ✅ The Real Goals: Experiences hit harder than stuff, memory-making outlast things

If you love history, consumer psychology, or just need to justify that 12-foot skeleton…this one’s for you.

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**DISCLAIMER**
Ticker metrics change as markets and companies change, so always do your own research. The content in this podcast is based on personal experience and is for educational purposes, not financial advice. See full disclaimer here.

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Transcript

Welcome to roaming returns a podcast about generating a passive income with dividend stocks so you can secure your finances and liberate your life. 

Happy Halloween! Today we’re carving into the real story behind the holiday—how a Celtic new-year fire festival morphed into America’s second-biggest shopping event. We’ll fly from Samhain bonfires and Roman mashups to All Hallows’ Eve… and then follow the money: We’ll reveal how much people spend on costumes, candy and décor. And why perfectly rational adults buy bat skeletons, pet capes, and 12-foot yard monsters. 

Halloween is the ultimate experience purchase—nostalgia, status, escapism, and a little fear-induced dopamine hit. Stick around for the psychology, the stats, and the wild ways marketers use scarcity and social proof to make us happily overspend.

Na na na na na na na. What's up, guys? Sorry, my costume's in storage. I have no idea where it's at.
Yeah, it's been really hectic being between three different places. So I'll have to wear it next week. Just pretend next week that it was this week.
Yeah, we're a little behind schedule because I got, we both kind of got a little sick there for like a day, day or two. You still hear it a little bit, but. So.
I'll cough periodically, but it is what it is. We're still going to do the Halloween one because. Because it's Halloween.
Halloween's is awesome. Halloween is Friday, so it'll be tomorrow whenever you guys listen to this. Anyway, Halloween is the most important holiday of the year.
It isn't the most important holiday of the year. It is. Why? Not because of the chocolate or because of.
Chocolate. The constant, constant candy. I always went for chocolate.
Other candy I just threw out. Skittles. Like, I don't want this, this peasant stuff.
Give me. Sprees. Give me, give me the chocolate.
Smarties. That's what it was. Smarties.
Okay, so Halloween's origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, even though it's spelled Samhain. I don't know. That's how you say Samhain? Samhain.
Wow. The Celts who lived 2000 years ago, mostly in the area. Why is this backstory history important to investing? Because it shows the history of Halloween.
We'll get to the investing part, but this is the fun part. Okay. The Celts who lived 2000 years ago, they were mostly in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom and France.
They celebrated their new year on November 1st, which is a sidebar. My new year is August 9th, which is my birthday. That's when my new year starts.
Other, other people do other things, but a lot of people I know do January 1st. It's a new year. Oh, kind of like fiscal years being September.
Yeah. So my, my new year starts on my birthday. I guess the Celts started on November 1st.
So that means that their new year's Eve was Halloween. So that Halloween marked the end of the summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter. I actually didn't know that.
End of the year. The time of the year that was often associated with human death. So like Halloween and cold, dark death have always been kind of like intertwined.
The Celts believe that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. And on the night of October 31st, they celebrated Samhain, again, Samhain, when it was believed that the ghost of the dead returned to earth. So they had a lot of like beliefs.
One of their was that the ghost caused trouble and they damaged crops, things of that nature. I guess all you really cared about back 2000 years ago was your food supplies. The Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids or Celtic priests to make predictions about the future.
So for a people entirely dependent on the volatile people like you, dependent on a volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort during the long, dark winter. Winter is coming. Winter is coming.
So to commemorate, I speak English, I swear to God. I don't understand why you put these big words in your notes if you can't even say that. They just sound good in my head.
So to commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires where people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifice to the Celtic deities. During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes typically consisting of animal heads and skins and attempted to tell each other other's fortunes. When the celebration was over, they relit their health fire, their health fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.
So they did some wacky shit. Leave it to the Druids. By 43 AD, the Roman Empire had conquered a majority of the Celtic territory.
And so in the course of the 400 years, they ruled the Celtic lands. Remember that's Ireland and the UK, that area there. In the 400 years, they ruled that lands.
Two festivals of Roman origin were combined with their traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain. The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees.
The symbol of Pomona is the apple and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of bobbing for apples that's practiced today on Halloween. Oh, that's actually interesting. So there's a lot of... Halloween's not just what you guys think it is.
It's a lot of history mashed together. It's very interesting. So then the Catholic Church had to get involved.
In May of the year 609, Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome in honor of all Christian martyrs and the Catholic feast of All Martyrs Day was established in the Western Church. Pope Gregory III later expanded the festival to include all saints as well as all martyrs and moved the observance from May 13th to November 1st. Seems odd.
By the 9th century, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands where it gradually blended with and supplanted older Celtic rites. In the year 1000, the Church made November 2nd All Souls Day, a day to honor the dead. It's widely believed today that the Church was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related Church sanction holiday.
They do that a lot actually. Like the Jesus being born in the summer and then Christmas replanting. Yeah.
All Souls Day was celebrated similarly to Samhain with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels, and devils. The All Saints Day celebration was also called All Hallows or All Hallowmas meaning All Saints Day, and the night before it, the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic region began to be called All Hallows Eve and eventually Halloween. Oh, I can see that.
All Hallows Eve, Halloween. Interesting. V and E. The Germans.
Oh, now we're going to go from the old world of Rome to the new world of us Americans. The celebration of Halloween was extremely limited in colonial New England because of the rigid Protestant belief system there. Halloween was more commonly recognized in Maryland and the southern colonies.
As beliefs and customs of different European ethnic groups and American Indians meshed, a distinctly American version of Halloween began to emerge. The first celebrations included play parties, which were public events held to celebrate the harvest. Neighbors would share stories of the dead, tell each other's fortunes, dance, and sing.
Colonial Halloween festivals also featured the telling of ghost stories and mischief-making of all kinds. By the middle of the 19th century, annual autumn festivities were common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere in the country. In the second half of the 19th century, America was flooded with new immigrants, especially millions of Irish people fleeing the famine helped to popularize the celebration of Halloween nationally.
Far away from European traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house-to-house asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became today's trick-or-treat tradition. Young women believed that on Halloween they could divine the name or appearance of their future husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple pairings, or mirrors. In the late 1800s, there was a move in America to mold Halloween into a holiday more about community and neighborly get-togethers than about ghosts, pranks, and witchcraft.
At the turn of the century in 1900, Halloween parties for both children and adults became the most common way to celebrate the day. Parties focused on games, foods of the season, and festive costumes. Parents were encouraged by newspapers and community leaders to take anything frightening or grotesque out of Halloween celebration.
Because of these efforts, Halloween lost most of its superstitious and religious overtones by the beginning of the 20th century. In the 1920s and 30s, Halloween had become a secular but community-centered holiday, with parades and town-wide Halloween parties as featured entertainment. Despite the best efforts of many schools and communities, vandalism began to plague some celebrations in many communities during this time.
By the 1950s, town leaders had successfully limited vandalism, and Halloween had devolved into a holiday directed mainly at the young. Due to the high number of young children during the 1950s, parties moved from town civic centers into the classroom or home where they could be more easily accommodated. Between 1920 and 1950, the centuries-old practice of trick-or-treating was revived.
Trick-or-treating was a relatively inexpensive way for an entire community to share the Halloween celebration. Families could also prevent tricks being played on them by providing the neighborhood children with small treats. American tradition of Halloween was born in the 1950s, and it's actually what's going on still today.
Today, Americans spend more than $11 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country's second largest commercial holiday after Christmas. Become a problem because Halloween starts in July and it ends in like middle of October and Christmas starts like the middle of October and we actually were just at Home Depot again and uh there's like Halloween stuff up with Christmas stuff yeah and people are putting their Christmas lights up already I was like wow that's really early ballsy considering most people didn't used to do it until after Thanksgiving and now it's like a whole way before like Halloween are they protesting probably um like as we mentioned uh trick-or-treating dates all the way back to all souls days parade in England but during the all souls days like the poor citizens would beg for food and families would give them pastries called soul cakes in return for their promise to pray for the family's dead relatives so it was like a covert contract like hey if you want if you want this pray for my family members whoa that's creepy the church actually embraced that by saying that hey that actually replaces the practice of leaving food and wine for roaming spirits so the church was all for it the tradition of dressing the costumes for Halloween has both European and Celtic root hundreds of years ago winters was an uncertain and frightening time for like everybody you weren't like a lot of people weren't sure they would actually survive the winter because it was so cold and like sickness was prevalent and things of that nature food supplies often ran low for many people and uh and then because food supplies was low and there was a lot of sickness and death people were actually afraid of the dark and Halloween it was believed that the ghost came back to the earthly world and like terrorized the living because they didn't want to be ghosted so to be to avoid being recognized by the ghost people would wear masks when they left their homes on Halloween that's like that's where the costume things came from it's a long way of getting to like how how the costumes came about it was actually like a disguise to trick spirits this reminds me of the telephone game where somebody says something into the phone and then like it goes past down the line it turns into some crazy nonsense this whole freaking sequester sequence of how things unfolded is hilarious so not only would people wear like masks and disguises to trick the ghost but a way to actually keep like one of the popular myths of the era was to keep ghosts away from your houses you would just leave bowls of food outside to appease the ghost and that's actually still practiced today as well but that's like a history of it now we're gonna get to the economic point uh the economic the best data available on halloween spending each year comes from the national retail federation it's uh the nrf which they they survey americans about their shopping plans just before the holiday so like there's it's not like a scientific study where they like get like a vast uh or like what do you if you take polling in um school they you have to have like a certain breakdown to have like an accurate poll this isn't like i don't think it's 100 accurate but it's like the best we got anyway uh what they found in 2024 is that american consumers will they spent over 11 billion dollars and what they found what they found this year is that spending is expected to reach 13.1 billion dollars in 2025 so even if people pinched for funds they're like we're gonna save up for thanksgiving or halloween shopping despite a lot of consumers reportedly cutting back on per person spending to manage cost because of inflation or job security or whatever all the uh economic things going on that people are worried about interesting uh the most recent survey which was conducted in the middle of this month also found that a three out of four americans will so they're going to celebrate halloween in some fashion um i don't know who doesn't observe the holiday i guess people that are really really religious like it because it is kind of like a sacrilegious and like a lot of like a lot of religious eyes the the federation takes them out of the equation so they found that the typical person celebrating the the holiday of halloween will actually spend 104 this year on halloween that's it that's it yeah um the federation that breaks down the spending into four categories about one-third of the spending will be costumes for children adults and pets about one-third will be spent on decorations like giant skeletons big pumpkins etc those inflatable things you see everywhere lights whatever and almost the almost a third is spent on candy and there's a little bit of stuff spent on greeting cards i didn't know that people set out cards for halloween like happy halloween that's crazy just to show you like where we've come from in 2005 the federation estimated that halloween would only generate 3.3 billion dollars of spending and we're up to 13.2 billion in 20 years so that shows you that halloween spending has grown dramatically by about three and a half times in just two decades how much has the population got up populations went up less than less than three and a half times i can tell you that much okay i figured you'd know that random statistic no because 2005 the population i think was in america was 550 million and we're like 700 million now something like that 800 million i don't know the exact numbers if we're adjusting for inflation that means that it's doubled if you actually include the the price of inflation from 2005 to 2025 so even doubling in just 20 years is insane that like if you do that like it's going to be 26 billion in like 2050 yeah everybody loves halloween i don't actually know anybody that hates it so then they have to like try to figure like to isolate the factors that have driven halloween spending so high some of it is due to inflation which has increased prices by about 65 percent over the past two decades which is retarded and then this got me down another rabbit hole where i was looking at inflation like inflation like is crazy like if you look at like a hundred year period of time inflation is like at three point like 3.1 but we're supposed to believe that two percent is like a good a good inflation number but that shit adds up because three three point one it's like it's compounding but in a negative way that means 3.1 on top of 3.1 and then 3.1 it's crazy like inflation just eats at everybody's uh money um okay here's the numbers 2005 the u.s had about 290 million people while today the figure is closer to 340 million i wasn't i wasn't even close i didn't even you didn't even remember you put that in here good work so like inflation going up 60 percent and the population going up 50 million explains some of the growth but it doesn't explain it all no that number way too much uh so spending is monitored each year via the consumer expenditure survey and this survey has publicly provided data on annual candy spending since 2013 when it found that the typical family spent 88 a year on candy uh the last figures i could find were in 2023 that show that u.s families have actually taken that 88 and down near doubled it to 164 on candy and that's only a decade so if you extrapolate that more so that would be probably 300 so it probably be they said spent 44 on candy in 2005 so that's just a best guess jesus in uh in 2005 the best estimate was 1.2 billion was spent on just dressing up while this year the figure is expected to be 3.8 billion dollars spent on costumes and everything um so why the just astronomical increase in costume spending well costumes used to be just for children but today that many adults are actually dressing up and their pets and their pets and the pets about one in five adults say they will be wearing a costume for halloween and as karm just said there's millions of dollars spent each year for the for the animals as well which is cool i guess because like i guess the dog wants to be a cat i don't know what's a cat um in 2005 the usda the united states something another i don't know what they are oh it's about to get loud calculated there are about four and a half pounds of pumpkins for sale for every person just before the holidays in 2023 the amount that amount had risen to almost six pounds per person that means there are about 50 more pumpkins available for carving and making pies than there were in 2005 so in like a little under two decades that we that increased by 50 which is crazy and we're starting to get projections from the different governmental agencies for uh what's going to be going down in 2025 and like i previously said they're expecting 13.1 billion spent nearly 80 of the people they surveyed in a consulting firm called pwc so they plan to open their wallets to join halloween fun they're expecting to spend 289 on average while parents with young kids are forecast to spend 445 that was what i was more expecting those numbers earlier so even like so like one of the things they found and during when they surveyed this stuff is even though people are like there's a lot of economic uncertainty and there's a lot of fear like with jobs and prices and everything people are still not cutting back on halloween it's like the one like there's like a couple holidays i'm assuming christmas they'll cut back on we're already seeing the retail numbers come in from people who are planning to spend less for christmas because of the inflation i'm sorry the tariff price is going up that's already started to come in like they're saying 10 to 12 less than they spent last year on christmas but halloween's like one of the days that people like i'm assuming the super bowl will be like another holiday where people are going to open their wallets regardless but they're according to the survey where people are putting their their money to use is they're spending on average 58 on costumes 57 on decorations 51 on food drink and supplies for parties 51 which is super low for event tickets 50 on trick-or-treating and then other other category of 23 was that per person yeah per person 51 dollars for event tickets is super low because we go generally on halloween we go places and it's yeah but most people go one place we go like six and like if you do the costumes on amazon that 58 seems high but i don't know decoration low to me decoration seems low because i was just looking at the prices when we were in home depot for the decorations and they're like hundreds yeah but usually you'll add a couple each year you don't just go all out unless you're saving up for a big skeleton or whatever um one of the things they found there during this survey was that 34 of the consumers that they surveyed had already spent half of their halloween budget by uh because september 1st well yeah because it's becoming early you can get your shit earlier and earlier in the year people are spending it as soon as it comes out um i don't know why but because halloween is something we look forward to we get here we're getting the psychology of halloween now just a little bit um the psychology of halloween spending is driven by a combination of social pressure nostalgia and a desire for escapism nostalgia nostalgia people spend on halloween due to social um due to social proof and a feeling of urgency created by the how the holiday seasonal nature like if your neighbor puts up a pumpkin i guess you put up a pumpkin i don't i don't know like the the about the the keeping up with the joneses shit but then they also are tapping into the nostalgia nostalgia for childhood memories and using it as a sanctioned opportunity for self-expression and connection this leads to behaviors like wanting to keep up with neighbors impress guests and create lasting memories even with even when they're faced with economic pressure that was one of the interesting things that i found when reading the surveys that people will not cut back on their halloween spending even when they're faced with economic pressure because they have to keep up with their neighbors and people do that for christmas and that's just across the board for the keep up with the joneses thing um yeah that makes sense yeah so social proof and belonging consumers are often feel influenced by what friends and family are doing leading to a desire to keep up and a fear of missing out so they're actually having two of the if you remember the biases we talked about before you have to keep up with the joneses which is a different bias than the fomo so they're actually being hit with two different psychological things at the same time that sucks for them um a good like high brand or like what people consider high quality branded products can signal um does that even matter with how it apparently does really i didn't even know there was a brand consignor that can signal that you understand the culture that you live in and desire to fit in with your neighbors so if your neighbor goes out and buys like an expensive i don't know what the hell expensive unless they're talking about like this the trending freaking costume for the kids and stuff because it was like the frozen crap was all over the place the one year and whatever i could see that they went into like a thesis about branded products and I was like what I didn't know Halloween again I did not know how we had I guess that's social proof and fear of missing out as your kid has a brand nostalgia and Emotional connection for many adults spending on Halloween is a way to recreate warm childhood memories and a sense of comfort and security It also serves as a way for parents to create cherished memories for their children You're hitting it from two different angles like you're revisiting your childhood memories of Halloween and you're actually creating memories for your children The one that I thought would be discussed more was the escapism and self-care Halloween is seen as a sanctioned Event and a form of escapism what I mean by that is you can do But you could step away from your everyday life if you're a banker You can be like a serial killer on Halloween and it's perfectly acceptable This actually makes consumers less sensitive to price as the emotional experience is the priority I thought that'd be bigger too because I imagine that's why a lot of people dress up because they're they're able to actually there was like some psychological Surveys out there like I didn't want to dig too deeply into the psychology of Halloween Just wanted to kind of gloss over it But there are some like like people it is like in the forefront of their mind and when they choose a costume It's not they're not sure I think it's a car Choosing like a cool cost and what they're choosing is something that they wish they could be like if you wish without being judged if you Were stronger you'll get like a superhero costume or if you wanted to be Darker you get like a serial killer If you're like a goody-two-shoes and you want to spend the day being a serial killer Like it's it is a form of escapism and it's actually one of the things that I think Halloween represents the most psychologically But it wasn't addressed too much in the survey I wonder why that is but if people would more lean into that factor It's like people want to be the P and this is why I like Halloween the most it's because it's the one day of the year or the one time of year where basically the macabre and obscure and just Unapologetically on authentic stuff is accepted for what it is. The gruesome doesn't matter. It's normalized I like that because there's always bad when we highlight so much of the good positive fake superficial crap In the rest of the year and the part that like I completely forgot about for my youth and Like I don't really experience too much in my adulthood is the fear and dopamine Like when you go to a haunted house and you get the shit scared out of you That's actually a dopamine like a huge dopamine drop So people love how a Halloween from that because you can release like massive amounts of dopamine But then you have because you have the sugar Then you have the fear the fear component and then you have like the fitting in component like where people like oh, that's a cool Costume a nice house a nice party like so you have like the complimentary stuff Like there's dopamine drops left and right very Halloween more so than any other day of the year I think I can't think of another Another day that drops as much dopamine as Halloween well especially if you're dressing up as something that you're like again not allowed to be and then it's like a part of you that you're Like putting out there and Halloween is like that's awesome costume or awesome costume, bro, like sick blah blah Yeah, you get those like validations of the thing that you're usually having to mask Yeah, I could see that then like if you know like if it's like the The government agencies that do the surveys know this then you better You know damn well sure that the Advertisers and the marketers and the retailers know this as well and what they're actually starting to do more and more the reason that they Start Halloween decorations in say like July is because it actually creates a scarcity like a scarcity poem like oh there might they may not Have that really cool Decoration in August so I can pick it up now Yeah, and even though it's pricey or than it should be it's like it's a play on your psyche that you have to spend It creates a sense of urgency that encourages consumers to buy now rather than wait and the retailers are really good at that Mm-hmm, really really good at that like we started seeing Halloween stuff back around July didn't we? Yep It was in the July beginning.
Oh, yeah, it was crazy early Because that because they then they determined that if they actually had longer periods like Halloween used to be like when I was a kid Like I'm dating myself here now But Halloween was something that you basically had two weeks to prepare for maybe three and it like they started to see well if we Can actually extend that Halloween season? We can get more money from people we can pull more money like we can run sales like in August for candy then we Can run sales in September for candy? So though so now they're down that there's a long lead up to Halloween in stores It creates a sense of declining time pushing consumers to spend more before the season passes like they found that I don't like it logically It makes sense, I think it does but and another thing that leads to a like a lot of economic activity during the Halloween season as many like a lot of people feel pressure to spend more Halloween in the previous generations and Especially when they're influenced by social media or seeing how much others are spending and quote and unquote enjoying Halloween like social media like for all the positive things of social media that it's the devil in a lot of ways and this is One of those ways where it's like oh look at how much fun. I'm having with my Halloween decorations Look how spooky my house is didn't they like again like as we do the social media stuff And that's one of my pet peeves with it That's why we always have like we have our fuck-ups every year wouldn't like we have like oh I whiffed on that because like you never see like the dark side of social media It's always like everything's perfect look at how happy I am with my Halloween decorations But they won't tell you that I just spent like $700 more than I should have I'll just show you the big the big inflatable things and whatnot, right and the last thing that actually people are willing to Shell out money for is because it's they every humans have an innate Desire for memory making spending is often linking is linked to creating lasting memories with many stating that memories Made are priceless even if the spending goes way way way beyond their budget. It's worth it because you made a memory I Could see that because that's one of our dress vacations although we try to do Less spending if possible, so we're gonna put all this to I'm gonna tie it all together here We're gonna identify the four main drivers of why people spend on Halloween the first By long shot is Halloween buys you experience experiences bring us more happiness than things according to several psychological studies What are the one like one of the most recent ones was a study at Cornell? University they found that experiment experiential purchases money spent on doing tend to provide more enduring happiness the material purchases money spent on having So in other words what this study found is you're more likely to be happier for a long time Forking out cash on a two-week vacation than the latest I found.
Yeah, true Okay, so this that corner this Cornell study goes further and it looks at hedonic differences, which I guess is sensation differences Pre-consumption here to the researchers found that people derive more happiness from the anticipation of experiential purchases Can't wait to read my book on the cruise ship the material purchases Can't wait to get those sunglasses waiting for an experience is even more pleasurable than waiting to receive a material goods So that's again like they found out probably through studies similar to this that if they extend the Halloween system Season, they're actually leading people to have this feeling of oh, I cannot wait for Halloween go look at all my cool shit So Halloween if you take that into consideration is like the quintessential experience planning out your costume Compiling accessories and penciling the parties are all things you anticipate for weeks Sometimes even months in advance take a minute and think about path about a past Halloween when you completely nailed it that costume studies Show that when we reflect back on purchases we made experiences make us happier than possessions It's interesting to dwell on that experiences are often fleeting over-and-done kind of events like short vacations a wedding, etc So when you buy a new TV, you're probably thinking that you're investing in something. You'll hope you'll have for a while but science shows we develop hedonic adaptation a Tolerance to things meaning when we're constantly exposed to our clothes or air pods or TV their meaning to us diminishes and they just become fuzzy in the background That's precisely why Halloween it makes people want to invest so much time and money into it and cherish the experience it produces for a long Time after yeah, that's a complacency for things thing. We've talked about before It's really interesting that car like if you want to like look it up, it's like it's the Cornell Survey about like things versus experiences.
It's a very interesting sir. You have it. We could just link it in the show notes Okay, we'll link it in the show notes.
The second reason that Halloween is so like the bomb for people is People have this competition thing. Oh, yeah, the competition thing is Vying to be the best at all costs Because things get so competitive a Halloween to a point where it reverses what traditional economics call free rider problem The free rider problem is a theory that assumes we'll spend less when we think our neighbors or governments will take on the expense In other words, there's almost zero incentive to spend money on something if we can enjoy its benefits without spending it all. Yeah Yeah, so like think about like maintaining public parks or clean drinking water things of that nature like many many of us are actually lucky to have access to these things without spending much at all other than Taxes, but when it comes to Halloween this theory doesn't hold We really can't participate in Halloween unless we fork out cash for costumes decorations and candy.
In fact, it's quite the opposite We have to spend in order to in order to participate unless you're a master of do-it-yourself Costumes and decor. Oh, yeah this coupled with the inevitable competitive Competitiveness of Halloween leads to overspending everyone tries to outdo the other when it comes to decorations parties and even the type of candy You're handing out for trick-or-treaters The point here is that you have to have the best costume or the most haunted house and win first place in the costume Competition often the times at all costs. So they're like that's another reason like Halloween spending has went up so much It's like best costume wins money Best house on the block.
I definitely know a bunch of people have tried to do that The third reason why Halloween spending has gone cray-cray overspending is everyone's doing it. So whatever we like Think about when you when we were all kids like we were kids. I know I heard it I'm sure a lot of people heard if you all your friends jump off a bridge Would you do it too? And the answer was yeah, everyone's doing it.
Sounds fun So like what those adults were trying to convey was the idea of social proof that's social psychology Speak for looking to others to figure out how to act in a given situation Yeah, they shouldn't use the bridge analogy with me because I'd want to jump up the bridge even if nobody was doing it So when we're unsure as humans how to behave we look to others for information or cues if everyone around us is doing a we're Likely not to do B unless you're me This kind of influence is called an informational influence social proof can also describe normal normative influence Or the pressure to conform in order to be accepted or like so if all your friends order matcha ice cream But you prefer vanilla you're probably going to end up ordering that green tea treat the matcha ice cream Just so you can fit in with everyone else There's a lot of people to do that so whatever the motivation behind social proof it often leads to herd behavior It's like we talked about herd mentality when it came to investing But it actually applies to like like we said multiple aspects of your life This I usually have it in one area you have it in multiple So like the in this in in Halloween since if everyone's getting into this Halloween thing So I'll follow the herd and get in costume to Social media has a huge role here as well We know our friends and family will upload their costumes and trick-or-treating escapades so we have we'll have the urge to overspend to conform to what they're doing and The way around that is you're not into Halloween get off Instagram But like there's like the herd mentality is huge huge during Halloween I think more so than Christmas like every other holiday. I can't think of a holiday where the herd mentality is so prevalent No, it's definitely not flag day. I Don't know I feel like the gift-giving thing with Christmas is probably a thing Maybe one up or you have to maybe say maybe the gifts and Christmas or the the Easter stuff like candy I Could see Easter being run with the gift baskets and now that they're doing dress-ups and other weird crap It's like basically the other Halloween And the fourth and final reason why the good Halloween spending is gone cray-cray is that because like we mentioned before being scared makes us happy Science has shown this over and over and over that feeling scared causes the release of dopamine a neurotransmitter that makes you feel good So even though you're gonna think scared shitless where you shit your pants you still feel good about it In a recent study where researchers examined why people proactively buy tickets to go to haunted houses or watch horror movies Researchers took a look at volunteers brain activity before and after the haunted house trip and discovered that getting scared in a controlled environment Halloween has its health benefits Interesting being scared is a high that gets you your dopamine Your feel-good chemicals going and it's usually safe for you as you instantly realize you aren't in any real danger In fact, the volunteers reported feeling less anxious and tired after their haunted house trip.
They ran out of the house is terrified But also laughing Moral of the story is people pay to get scared because it gives them an instant rush Cue the obsession with outrageously priced Halloween costumes. So all this tied together Basically how I can in short consumers don't really buy items They're investing in an experience and memory and attempt temporary escape from reality. That's what Halloween is.
I can see that sure, there's like candy involved and there's like it's like a Multi-billion dollar industry and you have like the psychological triggers with like the FOMO and the herd mentality But like if you boil it down to it's like it's simplest like simplest form is that you're making in Making a memory you're creating experience and you're actually beginning to escape for reality. That's my question is is the coughs worth it then? It depends what you're doing, right to me. No, unless it's like when we go like when we went to Salem for example that was worth it because it was cool I was gonna say like Halloween's one of our favorite things to spend on like the amusement parks with the howling and I don't it's Not the scary part that I like.
I like watching other people like shit their pants And it's so funny because you can like point and they know who to get We've actually seen stuff now where you can actually pay for the what was it? The sissy pass it's the chicken pass the chicken chicken pass chicken ticket That's what I was chicken ticket where they basically can't scare you or they don't touch you can't touch you Yeah Cuz like what like one of the biggest bitches about Halloween was that like when you went to like places to get scared They always like They could come up to you, but they couldn't touch you So now they're actually starting in a lot of places that where they can actually physically Touch you to try to scare the crap out of you People can pay for the chicken ticket to not be whatever but that's actually funny because there's a lot of people that don't want To be picked on and when we've been in the houses We usually go in the front because they don't hit us and I'm like third one back and it's like there's one person always in Your group that's like terrified of everything I don't even know why they're there, but there's so much like it It really does enhance the experience though sure laughing so hard, but I go for like the decorations. I love the aesthetic component I love to see the creativity and like the intricacies of things and like the amount of effort that they put into stuff But like we've been we go to haunted houses all the time. We do Salem Sleepy Hollow Sleepy Hollow was awesome Universal in Florida We've been to studios Universal Studios in Florida.
We did the haunted trail in New Connecticut we did a haunted trail We did a really sick escape room in New Jersey. Yeah, it's like we'd like it's like It's been kind of like because of the condo problem. We have a Hershey Park Hershey Park at Doherty Park So this year we're hoping to be able to go somewhere I don't know it's like so late in the year and We'll have to see if they have them in November because we've been kind of sick and like wrapping things up with the condo Officially done BTW condos done.
It's being listed tomorrow Yep but like my problem with like when I was researching this they actually didn't like go into detail about the Experiences like there has to be other people out there that just like I'd be willing to spend a thousand dollars on a good experience And fuck no nothing on a costume and nothing on candy Just like good experiences where like there was like a lot of Creativity put into it and like a lot of effort put into it We've been we've been to some haunted houses that were just trash. I love the costume component But it is not economically feasible for like a one-day thing and most people want to be different costumes every year I thought it'd be really cool if they actually had like costume rental places and the other thing that annoys me and I think this Is where like DIY and your own like costumes and decoration makes so much more sense Because people are buying the same stuff and then everybody has the same shit Yeah, it's like it's starting to become like cookie cutter molds and it's Like the obsession with it. I don't know.
I just feel like it's gonna lose. It's like in uniqueness So I think it's really cool when people like do whatever like one example real quick Before we get off we went up to Sleepy Hollow and we went to the haunted house and like the whole time You're in Sleepy Hollow all they talk about the headless horse the headless horseman the headless horseman the headless horseman And even the thing we went to is called the horseman's haunt It was a horseman's hollow. We went to something called the horseman's hollow and there was no headless horseman.
I Was so pissed I bitched about that for at least a month Yeah, it was probably more than a month and he brings it up every year How do you go to Sleepy Hollow the birthplace of the headless horseman? There's no headless horseman. What in the absolute fuck right? So I don't recommend that It said it only had missed it like one every four years or something Again doesn't make sense to me. Sleepy Hollow was really cool outside of that haunted house.
That was kind of gay, but Salem Salem was the best. I think Salem was the best and that was really interesting And they're really into it like year-round. So it's not just like a Halloween.
You can go like in September and get Similar experience, I mean they probably don't have the haunted house. We didn't do any haunted houses there because I think it was lacking something But you can do the ghost walk tours a Kind of regret not getting the like Boston Pass We'll probably do that next time we go up that so like one on our agenda for probably the next one to probably one to Three years is in New Orleans. We want to go to New Orleans for Halloween Oh, there's gonna be some scary like one of my one of my one of my one of my bucket list is to go to Romania Go to Dracula's Castle Transylvania.
Yeah, so that's all my bucket list. Although we did just find out that Philly has a vampire museum Philadelphia actually has something called the vamp. Oh, which is actually a vampire museum and like when people hear that They're like all the vampire museum now They actually have like the fucking tools and shit that they used to kill vampires back in like the 1800s, you know vampires So we might do that figure out what stuff's open and see if we can get any like last-minute haunted house that sounds sick like I saw like some of the die like some of the Illustrations of what they hold like they have like a like a gun that fired off multiple stakes It looks really cool Like Van Halen, yeah, so it's pretty cool But yeah So we probably won't go over the weekend just because everybody else goes on Thanks for Halloween for I keep saying Thanksgiving on Halloween for that stuff and I don't like crowds So if they have anything into like the beginning of next week, we will probably go a lot of places There's like this is the first week of November.
We'll see. We'll see. That's the Halloween the history of it It's really fucked up the history of Halloween.
Yeah, but this wasn't about the history is about the spending This but I still think the Halloween is actually a healthy thing If you're like the spending of it, which is internally online up Because if you are looking forward to it all year Maybe you figure out why you're looking to it forward all year if it really is that personal alignment with the costume choice but if it's for like the social affirmations and the dopamine hits like it's just part of the circle jerk of The rest of everything else like probably in your life keeping up with the Joneses and social affirmations I thought it was very interesting because a lot of the biases we discussed are Highlighted in Halloween. It was very interesting that guy's like, oh, I know what that is. Good.
I've covered that Oh, I know what that is because we covered that. Oh, that's interesting That's the same thing as whenever you like buy fucking in the video when it's $200 a share I do really like the costume rental idea because I'd rather have a really sick costume. That's super intricate Then a freaking really chintzy crappy one.
That's like new every year Yeah, like my pirate one I spent like probably a couple hundred dollars on it It's like super authentic leather belt like it's full full-blown But I wore that so many years, but it's in storage somewhere at this point So now I'm hoping next week. I'll be in costume just because we missed it this one. I'm sorry That was a whoopee cushion the one year.
I was I wish we still had that that was really funny It was a whoopee cushion one year one year. I was Jack the Ripper and then I was freaking um, Gizmo Gizmo from saw What's his name jigsaw Spirallys that was fun. We usually get into it more than we are that this year just kind of Sorry, it sucked.
Oh, yeah next year will be better And then we will have all sorts of shit to talk about but next week We're going to go into something really boring but super important It's the dollar cost averaging and I'm gonna actually pull it's super helpful I'm gonna actually pull Illustrations from the portfolios where we've actually dollar cost average and why we did it and it's pretty it's gonna be really helpful to people Because you can't like time the market the right time to buy a stock, but you can actually find ways to reduce your cost basis By doing the cost like we don't do like I don't recommend What everyone else does just put like a hundred dollars each week or each month or a hundred dollars every couple weeks into the market I like I'd strategically dollar cost average and I'll explain that all next week with uh with examples Sound fun and next week. We're not gonna be in like what whatever we're in now We're gonna be out somewhere and in cold with cats running around Facts facts. It's about time to move into the van.
Yep. I mean we've been sleeping in the van. It's sleeping in it We haven't actually moved into it.
That's not like next week. We should be almost into the van Yeah, we got a lot of stuff to sort through build out get rid of my crap downsize Stop coughing. So hope you guys have a good week.
I'll be better next week. Yep, and I'll be a costume. Yay