25 Cities Spending the Most on Halloween

Detailed Findings & Methodology

According to the NRF, Americans who celebrate Halloween intend to spend an average of $86.79 each this year. Of the $9 billion spent on Halloween this year, $3.2 billion will be spent on costumes, $2.7 billion on decorations, $2.6 billion on candy, and $400 million on greeting cards.

Based on our methodology, the cities that have the most opportunities to spend money on Halloween festivities are located heavily in the West. On our list, seven cities are in California, another four are in Texas, and three in Arizona. The rest are scattered across the country. Two of the cities on this list are in Hawaii.

To determine the cities that spend the most on Halloween, 24/7 Wall St. created an index that includes the number of costume stores, candy stores, haunted tours, haunted houses, and the total pounds of the top three candies bought in each state. We retrieved the number of costume and candy stores and haunted tours and houses from Yelp. We only considered cities with at least 100,000 people. For smaller states, we considered the five largest cities. The pounds of candy each state purchased comes from the blog, Candy Store, and is a weighted yearly average based on sales data compiled from 2007-2017 in which more recent years were weighed more heavily. For each state, we added the total pounds of the three most purchased candies. To determine how much candy was consumed in each city, we took the share of the state population that lives in a given city and multiplied that percentage by the state’s candy consumption. Population data comes from the Census Bureau’s 2016 American Community Survey 5-year estimates.

By 247tempo