How Much Did You Spend on Halloween Candy This Year?

Photo credit: Christian Cable, CC BY 2.0.

So… I was trying to figure out how to write about OMG INDICTMENTS, because WHAT DOES THIS MEAN and WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN and MAYBE I COULD DO A POST ABOUT MONEY LAUNDERING OR SOMETHING, and then I read this Atlantic article titled “Big Candy Bars Have No Place at Halloween” and I got angry, first because I needed a way to express my emotions about the current political situation and second because OF COURSE BIG CANDY BARS HAVE A PLACE AT HALLOWEEN, finding the one house with the big candy bar is like finding the big reward in the middle of all the smaller rewards, humans love going after unpredictable rewards, we’ve done experiments to prove that rats love unpredictable rewards and we’ve extrapolated that humans probably behave the same way!

There’s an argument to be made that humans would much rather go after predictable rewards; that we in fact crave stability. See “trunk or treating” vs. “trick or treating.” Also, the experiments where humans would rather accept a smaller amount of money if going after the larger amount of money means risking losing the money you already have. We did those experiments on humans because rats don’t understand money, and rats certainly don’t understand the complexity of negotiating a higher salary when you for sure need the lower salary to pay the mortgage. (Lab rats get free housing AND free healthcare.)

Anyway, I do believe that big candy bars have a place at Halloween, though they should be rare enough to mean something. Nobody should feel obligated to pack their front porch/car trunk/church basement full of big candy bars, even though Fun Size bars keep getting smaller, don’t tell me you haven’t noticed that they’ve been squares and not rectangles for years.

Now I’m thinking about full size vs. Fun Size and the declining candy middle class.

The Atlantic article says that Fun Size bars “offer a different way of acquiring, holding, and tasting familiar candy-bar products,” but when you’re a kid, Fun Size is one of the only ways you acquire, hold, or taste candy-bar products. I don’t know about you, but I can count the number of full-size candy bars that were given to me between age 5 and age 15 on one hand. (When I was maybe nine or so, I remember convincing my grandma to buy me a full-size Whatchamacallit. Or maybe it was a Caramello. Either way, she cut off a fun-size piece, gave it to me, and put the rest in the freezer.)

I also know that all those candy companies want kids to start building brand loyalty right away, to sit at their desk and write that their favorite candy is Nerds or Three Musketeers or Smarties because that’s the assignment on the board, “Musketeer” is a good spelling word, and maybe they’ll keep thinking that their favorite candy is Nerds or whatever until they’re an adult, even though they only originally wrote it because it was a lot faster than writing Hershey’s Special Dark, and then when they’re in their 30s they’ll buy a package of Nerds at a retro candy store—Seattle currently has two retro candy stores, or at least two I’ve seen—because they remember it being their favorite when they were a kid.

But brand loyalty, for me, came when my teeth broke the outer shell of a full-size Snickers. The experience of filling my entire mouth with candy, of being a fourth or fifth grader who was finally allowed to eat the whole bar at once, was enough to make me a Snickers fan for the next twenty years. I also loved Zero bars, in part because I like white chocolate and in part because that was the first candy bar I ever bought out of a vending machine with my own money, the link between work and consumption as strong as the sugar.

Of course now I’m thinking about David Sedaris, that line from Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim where his mother asks the Sedaris siblings to give their candy to the neighbor kids and his sister says “You mean our candy? That we earned?” because there was always a bit of that work-and-consumption link involved in trick-or-treating, the walking from house to house and smiling politely and not eating all the candy right away because those were the rules, at least in my house, you had to go home and spread it out over the carpet before you could eat one piece, or maybe two.

And the inevitable class assignments where you tally up your assets, first to learn how to count and then to learn about probability and later to learn about trading value. (Those assignments never considered which kid had the upper hand in the candy negotiation. Someone always has the upper hand, and someone always has more to lose.)

And, when you’re older, the surveys and articles and posts like this one, where I ask you how much you spent on Halloween candy.

Or, if you’d prefer, the question of whether you’d rather have small, stable rewards or larger, unpredictable rewards.

Or you could always discuss the current political situation.

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