Choosing Halloween Candy for the Thursday Onslaught...
Every year, my wife and I get ready for the troupes of costumed kids who will mysteriously appear at our door, bags and plastic pumpkins in hand, to request a treat and threaten a trick. Last year, to illustrate the scale of the issue, we had 187 trick-or-treaters visit our house. Some are kids we recognize from the neighborhood, while others are transported to our 1950s blue collar neighborhood in an assortment of minivans and SUVs. We have not seen a bus on our street so far, but we fear that may be next.
Our neighborhood in St. Paul, MN is very ethnically diverse, with just about every ethnic group in the city living in it, so we get to see a cross-section of the community at our door. One think we've noticed in the 9 years we've lived in our little rambler home is that the growing Hmong community in St. Paul has thoroughly embraced the Halloween holiday. But, I digress...
We've tried various strategies for supplying unhealthful, sugar-laden treats to this horde of youngsters. One year, we bought an enormous pile of "fun-size" candies along with small plastic Halloween bags from the dollar store. Each bag got an assortment of three "fun-size" items in it. That took too much time, in my opinion, so the next year we just grabbed a few of those candies out of a large bowl for each costumed character. That made distribution uneven, though, to the dismay of the "Billy got more than I did" crowd. Besides, I once opened one of the "fun-size" boxes of Junior mints and found only three of the candies inside. That didn't seem all that much "fun" to me.
We checked the cost of all this candy one year, to our shock and dismay. Then, I noticed, at Costco, boxes of full-size candies, usually in 24 or 30 unit boxes. When I calculated the price of enough of those full-size bars to meet the demand, it was clear that they were the way to go. So, two years ago, we began our "full-size packaged candy Halloween initiative."
As a marketing strategy, it has been extraordinarily successful. Word of mouth, apparently, is in full force. Our door is famous on Halloween now, and we may break our record for visitors this year. "Complete customer satisfaction" is our watchword, and by any measure, the "full-size candy initiative" is our most successful Halloween venture to date.
This seasonal post brought to you by MineralMan & Spouse - "The Full-Size Candy Team."
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Mr Pipi and I moved here, we bought candy.
Nobody showed up.
Undaunted, we still bought candy year after year expecting trick or treaters
It's now been nearly 18 years and we have still not seen hide nor hair of a trick or treater here. Which doesn't stop Mr Pipi, the Candy King, from buying bags of the stuff.
OK, so we're rural. But still. There were neighbor kids whose parents could have driven them around the area.
We'll probably still buy the candy, and who knows... maybe someday a lucky kid will show up and win an entire bag all for himself.
