I live in a town that gets swamped with Trick-or-Treaters. I’m also on a street with 2 people who go all out on decorations, so that people come from other towns to see them. On Trick-or-Treat, you literally can’t drive because it’s curb to curb zombies.
So I’ve been trying to find a way to stretch that Halloween dollar. Last year, I spent more on Halloween candy than I did on my wife’s birthday present.
Here’s what I’m doing differently this year:
Go with quantity, but be smart about it.
Just because it’s in a bigger bag, doesn’t mean it’s a better deal.
I got the following at Rite Aid:
$5.99: 20.1 oz bag of Kit Kats. It had 42 pieces.
$5.99: 19.55 oz bag of Snickers, Starburst, Twix and 3 Musketeers. Even though it said there were 38 in the bag, it was actually a bit more.
$5.99 19.75 oz bag of Hershey’s miniatures. There wound up being 66 pieces in that little bag!
$2.99: 10.2 oz Reese’s peanut butter pumpkins. Wound up being just 18, not as many as I thought, but still pretty good for 3 bucks, less if you have the discount card.
That’s 166 pieces of candy for $21 plus tax. So that does it for the good stuff, unless my wife and I hit the candy closet too much in the coming month. I’ll also go to Kmart soon, because they have one of those 3-pound bag of really cheap-o candies for like $10.
Anyway, where I was going with this is that there were advertisements for a 50-piece variety bag of candies for $8.88. But as you can see from above, I got more bang for my buck going for the mid-sized bags.
There were ads in the Oriental Trading catalogs for 100 pieces for $17. Shipping is free after a certain amount. But you can see from above that I did better than that.
How many per kid?
I try to give 2 pieces of candy per kid. Usually, this means one good thing like a Twizzler and another kind of lame thing like a piece of gum.
You really have to stretch it in my neighborhood. Unfortunately, when my daughter hands out candy, she is much more generous than me.
Also, choose who will get the best candy.
The best candy goes out earlier in the day to little kids. These are the ones who are the most excited to put on costumes and go door-to-door. They show up, and they get all the Hershey’s and Reese’s.
When a teenager comes up, it’s like “Hey, nice mask. Enjoy your Red Hots.”
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