Halloween City Kicks off Hiring, Sales

Signs of fall: Leaves turning color, football on TV, bags of single-serving candy bars in the store aisles — and the temporary Halloween City costume and decoration stores.

Halloween City outlets are opening throughout the country, including at 43711 Ford Rd. in Canton, which means between 20 and 25 temporary job opportunities at that location.

The walls of the Canton store are lined with frightening figures, including the Grim Reaper, all overlooking rows of rings, necklaces, makeup, fingernails, eyelashes, fangs, cuts and bruises, tattoos, chains, beard-and-mustache kits, masks and more accessories. Stacks of fog machines line the main store walkway, in various wattages; some include self-timers.

Halloween City, headquartered in Livonia, is a division of the New York-based Amscan Holdings. Halloween City is hiring about 10,000 people throughout the United States to work at its more than 400 locations, 27 of which are in Michigan.

The stores feature rows of indoor and outdoor scary decorations and costumes and are open only from Sept. 1 through the first two days of November, a timing unusual for a retail industry that typically relies on annual sales per square foot.

Sean Buffington, Halloween City's visual merchandising manager, said the Canton store will hire workers all the way up to Oct. 31. As Halloween is a $6 billion industry, second in spending only to Christmas, the sales will steadily increase up to the holiday, he said.

“For right now, we’re mostly selling decorations, as people are just starting to realize Halloween is around the corner,” Buffington said. “We start seeing the costume sales really increase in October.”

Laura Cathey, 46, of Novi is working her first year as manager of the Canton store. She previously worked at the Halloween City’s Livonia distribution center. “It was pretty stressful to get the store up and running," she said. "It’s not so bad right now."

She said the decorations are now flying off the shelves — some items almost literally. “Our best items have been the witches and the flying reaper,” she said, describing a skull-topped form with a black shawl and fierce-looking bony hands.

Not a lot of costumes have sold yet, Buffington said. This year, he predicts that new costumes such as the Angry Birds from the cellphone application game will be popular, as will get-ups patterned after the cast of the TV show Glee.

“Superheroes should make another good showing this year, with the Captain America and Thor movies out,” he said.

However, Buffington said, branded characters have been steadily losing steam to American ingenuity, as customers look to create unique costumes from a variety of items.

“I remember two years ago everybody wanted to be that pilot, Capt. Sully, who landed that US Airways flight into the Hudson River,” Buffington said.

“Nobody wants to show up at a party in the same costume,” Cathey agreed.

Halloween City stores are located in Northville, 17615 Haggerty Rd., and Novi, 43135 Crescent Blvd., as well as in many other southeast Michigan communities.