Hawking Halloween costumes turns out to be good, scary fun
By Irv Leavitt Sun-Times Media October 25, 2011 12:31PM
"This is what you want?" Henry Lato, 7, and mom Patty consider. |Allen Kaleta~for Sun-Times Media
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Updated: November 27, 2011 12:35PM
I showed the little girl several Halloween costumes, but they were all garbage.
Worthless trash. Fit for pigs.
They looked fine to me, and to her mother, but what did she know? After all it was Mom who dragged little princess into Card & Party Giant against her will.
Princess had seen the vampire costume she wanted, but in another store. “Why don’t we go back and get that one? Why caaaaan’t weee?”
“We’re here right now,” Mom sighed. “Let’s see what they have.”
I recommended Crimson Countess, $24.99, over Victorian Vampiress, also $24.99.
The red Countess costume was long in back and shorter in front, and cinched at the waist. Victorian Vampiress was pretty much a 6-inch collar on a floor-length bathrobe.
The kid squirmed and frowned and complained. Mom made no move to leave.
I don’t know anything about selling Halloween costumes — my assignment for the day — but I know a little about 8-year-old girls, having watched bunches of them play Barbies on my living room rug.
So I let somebody else take the next customer, and lounged in front of the big wall covered with numbered pictures of Halloween costumes. I reclined on the opposite side of the kid from Mom, since she now was established as The Bad Guy.
Princess stared at the board and grumbled. Then silence. Ten minutes of it.
No sweat. If you have little girls around your house, you know silence can be a blessing.
Then suddenly, “I know!” She actually was grinning. “I want the Victorian Vampiress!”
She picked the wrong costume, we all knew, but so did one other little bloodsucker I helped that day in the Glenview store. And she was happy.
Fantasy and reality intersect
Every costume I sold in a seven-hour stint at the 1015 Waukegan Rd. store was one that the customers seemed to look forward to wearing, though expectations often collided with reality.
For example, if you’re going as a taxicab, what’s that really going to look like?
“There is nothing I like better than to get a customer who came in for a Grievous and sell them a Darth Vader, and have them leave happy,” assistant manager Debbie Landmann told me.
Translation: We were sold out of costumes of Star Wars’ Gen. Grievous, who is an evil combination of metal and meat. But Darth Vader — who exudes a similar vibe — was in stock.
“That’s your customer?” store owner Chuck Schwartz asked as he passed the little vampiress. “Make sure and get her the accessories.”
I leaned over to mom and whispered in her ear: “You want fangs with that?”
Two different audiences
Most Halloween costumes can be divided into two categories. The first is kids’ costumes.
The second is costumes for adults, and those are not just costumes for bigger people. They are often adult in the sense of adult entertainment, adults only, adult beverages, adult movies, etc.
Most of the women who wanted such costumes avoided me like a disease. Maybe for a reason. As one woman trying on a Little Red Riding Hood outfit took one step out of the fitting room, I caught myself staring as if she were the first woman I’d ever seen in my life.
She ran back into the fitting room.
Technology time warp
Schwartz has another Giant store at 1880 W. Fullerton and a “pop-up” Halloween store at 6841 Dempster St. in Morton Grove,. He runs them all like it’s 1951. Employees keep track of stock on loose-leaf paper forms and legal pads.
“Wait’ll you see this,” manager Maria Arrojo said. She took me from storeroom to storeroom, where costumes are packed in hundreds of big cardboard boxes, stock numbers scrawled on the outside, the numbers progressing down one wall of shelves, across the back of the room and along the other wall to the door again, picking up in a different room somewhere else. And on and on.
Perhaps my favorite customer was a woman with a strikingly beautiful profile who came in with three children. She exuded efficiency, and knew just what she wanted for two of them, and we had them set aside quickly. Her middle school-aged daughter wanted the Ribbon Witch costume, but Mom didn’t like it at all.
And they’re off
Middle-school daughter now wanted to put together a jockey costume. She had the hat and boots and something that could pass for silks, so I found her a whip, spurs and goggles.
Then she realized the Indiana Jones-type whip we had was not the kind jockeys use.
“That’s right,” I said, remembering. “You need a riding crop.”
We didn’t have one of those. The closest I came was a rubber battle-axe affixed to a black plastic handle. The handle could be cut to size, and you could pull off the axehead and attach a leather loop to the end, I suggested.
It was obvious, however, that even that solution was not enough to persuade Mom.
Just then costume pro Landmann walked by, and said what I didn’t have the guts to say.
“Just cut off both sides of the axe and bend the top part over,” she said. Mom was delighted.
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