With Halloween on Wednesday and trade with China again a focal point in the election, lets take a look at where exactly the U.S. finds all the Halloween costumes we import each year.
For importers, the Halloween season peaks between May and September, with some 88% of the holiday’s overseas shipments arriving in that window.
So now is a good time to take a look back at this year’s imports to see how they performed.
Of the 75 million shipping manifests in the ImportGenius.com database--one for every shipment entering the U.S. by ocean in the last 5 years--just 16,772 shipments contain the term “Halloween” in the product description.
Although the country imported 60 million pounds (23M kgs) of “Halloween” products this season, that number is actually off more than 23% from the 2010 season. America’s importers are expecting a tame All Hallows Eve next Wednesday night. Or else they knew in advance that people dressing up Gangnam Style don’t need their cheap Chinese junk.
Yes, your intuition that all those pop-up Halloween stores sell nothing but Chinese junk proves true. Mainland China and Hong Kong supply 86% of our ocean-borne “Halloween” shipments. However, the ImportGenius.com for U.S. imports only includes ocean freight shipping manifests, so this discussion ignores overland imports from Mexico, which may be considerable.
Mexico’s contribution notwithstanding, China’s share of U.S. “Halloween” imports outnumbers all the other countries in the world combined by more than 5 to 1. Apart from Taiwan and South Korea, no other place supplied even 1% of the shipments.
What does this say about global manufacturing capabilities? Does it bother you that almost all our super hero capes and sexy nurse outfits originate in a single country?
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