That’s the Spirit

What my time was like working at Halloween’s biggest store

Spirit Halloween is iconic, right?

We all know the jokes that the minute any store, restaurant, or other memeable location shuts down or empties out a Spirit Halloween will be moving in the next week. They’re like the carrion birds of capitalism, always there to pick at the bones of a forgotten business.

Now, if you’re a Halloween lover or just a fan of costumes, spooky decor, and horror IPs you’ve probably visited a Spirit Halloween at one time or another and for a lot of Spirit fans of all (working) ages, the idea of working at one of their locations is an exciting opportunity to be surrounded by their favorite things during their favorite time of year. Plus the fact that you can get a 30% discount on any purchases you make is also a pretty big factor in why a lot of folks decide to put those applications in.

Last year in the late summer/early autumn of 2024, after spending a majority of the year unemployed, it was finally my turn to apply. Let me preface the following by saying this is my personal experience working at one particular Spirit Halloween store. My experience doesn’t necessarily reflect every experience at every store in the company. If you’ve worked at a Spirit Halloween, I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments!

Y’all, when I tell you I should have known from the first interaction with my store’s District Manager (DM) what kind of place this was going to be to work for. I got a random text from an unknown number asking questions about my application and availability. No greeting. No introduction. Honestly, the stranger danger of it all should have had me running for the hills but your girl was (and continues to be) too broke to care. They asked if I knew where the location was and told me to be there at 9am Monday morning, then they sent me the onboarding paperwork and that was that. I had zero idea who I’d be meeting or what I’d be walking into.

When Monday rolled around, I begrudgingly woke up early for my first day (I’m more of an afternoon to closing shift kinda gal) and showed up to our Spirit location. I had been to this location as a customer the year before and it. was. huge. Like stupid big with so many square feet and even a balcony we never used but could have easily housed some animatronics on just for the hell of it. I discovered the DM was a petite younger girl who had been with the company in some capacity for the last decade and sure had the attitude to make it seem like that was a big deal. Up front I have to say it, I was not a fan of our DM. While she was excellent when she interacted with customers, her leadership was less than stellar when it came to her employees. My store had a real high school drama vibe to it that I think started with her and trickled down which lead to a less pleasant working environment than it could have been.

My whole first week and a half was dedicated to building out the store. The early hires, manager, and assistant managers (ASMs) had already been there a week before I showed up setting out the pegboard walls along the perimeter, creating the aisles with more pegboard walls, blocking off a center section using, you guessed it, pegboard walls, and taking those same pegboard walls to make a spillover area in the back. Did I mention the pegboard walls? Cause Spirit has a shit ton of them. Speaking of the back room, while I think we were lucky to have a relatively large amount of space, it still wasn’t big enough for the dozens of truck deliveries we got through out the season. Each truck came with give or take four billion boxes of varying sizes and weights we had to lug into the store and attempt to find any available floor space to house them that didn’t immediately violate the fire code. AND SPEAKING OF FIRE CODE I’m like 80% sure no one in charge gave a damn about it because this was our backroom for a majority of the season.

By the time the store finally opened there had been no formal training for anyone outside of maybe management on how to use the registers. Like at all. And this was the first job for many of my coworkers so those kids were thrown into the deep end. It was especially wild to have no register training when what was sold to us as arguably our most important job while working at Spirit was to solicit donations for Spirit’s nonprofit program Sprit of Children. If you don’t know or haven’t been given the spiel, Spirit of Children (SOC) partners with child life departments of local hospitals across the country to make hospital stays less scary for kids and their families through funding new toys, equipment, therapy, bereavement, and providing costumes for halloween parties for kids on the unit. It’s a GIANT deal for the company and they make sure you, as an employee, know it.

Listen, I’m all for helping the kids out who are being cared for in local hospitals, but the pressure put on Spirit employees to get donations is kind of gross. At my store specifically we had zero fun/exciting incentives to up our individual SOC numbers and instead were often threatened with being taken off of the register for the season or not being given hours if we couldn’t hit whatever goals were expected. My personal donation numbers hit over $1,000, a number in the top 3 for regular non managerial employees, for the season and I STILL got talked to more than once about my percentage of donations being too low. And yet my ass was still always up on that register. I am not someone who likes to harass people. I don’t like upselling or asking for more money when they’re already spending a small fortune on overpriced costumes and I especially don’t like asking the same people I’ve seen three or four times already in a season to continuously donate. So I picked my battles. I asked when I felt it was right and didn’t bother when someone felt like they would be a problem. And somehow even with that lackluster strategy and a subpar pitch, I managed to do just fine.

Now let me run you through the highs and lows of my time at Spirit Halloween.

Did you know there’s a theme song for Spirit Halloween? Did you know it’s actually A TRIO of theme songs for Spirit Halloween? Well there are! And they’re silly and a lot of fun. I usually heard at least one or two parts on any given shift but I’ve heard a rumor that they were taken off of this year’s playlist which is a huge bummer. Speaking of the playlist, it was bangin’. All the halloween or spooky adjacent songs you could think of and you can access the official playlist on Spotify. Due to the playlist, all of the animatronics, and the laughs and screams of customers it was hella loud in there. If you’re someone who doesn’t do great with a lot of stimulation, working here definitely won’t be for you. Eventually, and surprisingly quickly, the noise kinda fades into the background but it can still be a lot.

We also had a pretty decent theft problem at our store. The location was so big that it was hard to be everywhere at once, especially if only 2 or 3 people were on the shift, so it was probably pretty easy for folks to take whatever they wanted and walk out. But they’d always leave evidence of their crime scattered around the store. So many empty packages or hangers left for us to find and have to do the walk of shame back up to the register with. Even though there wasn’t much we could do as employees to stop shoplifting, non managerial employees weren’t allowed to confront anyone, we kept getting in trouble for it. We were told we’d be “held accountable” for any empty stolen merchandise in our assigned zones. If you can believe it, I didn’t take kindly to such a threat and made sure to find out exactly how we’d be “held accountable” and was basically told we’d be written up if it was shown we weren’t in our designated areas that were too big for only one person to patrol. It also didn’t help that we had no way of communicating with one another except via a group chat on our phones. So if we needed back up or a manager, we had to text the group chat and hope someone saw it in a reasonable time or abandon our post and go hunt someone down. Walking talkies could have saved us a load of trouble.

At one point during the season we ran out of toilet paper in our staff bathroom. By run out I mean zero rolls anywhere. I don’t know whose responsibility it was to keep us in toilet paper, my money is on our DM or manager, but we went several full days with none. One night during the great TP desert of 2024 the belly mumbles and jumbles came for me and I had to go down the strip mall to a pizza place to deal with it. I’ll love those pizza employees forever.

I think the biggest drawback of my time working at this particular Spirit was all the gossip and drama and weird backstabbing that took place for a store that was only open for two months of the year. In general, I really liked my manger and one of our ASMs and felt like they both got done dirty by our DM and other ASMs on staff. There was a rumor that one of our ASMs was a mole for our DM and was always reporting back to her about anything the manager did. The ASM I liked was doing her best in her first managerial position with very little training or support and yet she still got called in for multiple meetings to get reprimanded and yelled at instead of actually being given the help she needed. I have to hope that other stores in the company have better leadership and a better ability to support their staff in a successful and less demeaning manner than ours did.

Overall, my time at Spirit Halloween was pretty memorable in both good and bad ways. As one of the oldest employees on staff, I really went in with a “this is a seasonal position and nothing really matters here” vibe that I think helped me weather the worst of the situation and also talk others off the ledge when they were stressed by customers, co workers, or higher ups. Would I go back? Maybe. I have to believe that with a shake up in management it could be a better experience for everybody. I haven’t been back to my store this year, I know it changed locations, but after seeing the behind the scenes of what happens there, Spirit Halloween has lost some of the magic it used to have for me. Instead of seeing cute decor and fun masks/costumes I see cheap, overpriced junk and mess. Instead of seeing employees having fun being surrounded by halloween I see employees being stressed and trying to make a quota. If you love Spirit Halloween, that’s awesome and I envy you but I think it’ll be a while until Spirit Halloween fills me with the same halloween spirit again.

Do you love Spirit Halloween? How often do you check out locations during the season? Have you ever worked for one or would you? Why or why not? Let me know your thoughts or if you have any questions about my time at Spirit in the comments!