>

seems like they could have still sold the business tho…just w/o the building.  inventory and contacts/pricing would be worth a dime, not to mention name recognition.
Maybe selling the same shit you can get at Dollar Tree with 1000% markup wasn't the best business idea. >

This right here. It was all cheap garbage with a markup. Then people used to go there for halloween costumes and Spirit Halloween flooded the market. >

I hope American halloween culture evolves to the point where we can have a high quality more expensive seasonal halloween store to compete with the shittiness of Spirit Halloween. Like the Whole Foods to their Walmart. 
No, I'm not still mad about how hard it was to find a cool costume last year that wasn't either incredibly cheap and crappy or incredibly overpriced, why do you ask? >

The problem is people don’t want to spend much on an outfit they will wear one day.  I think the best we can hope for is some kind of costume exchange where you buy a quality costume and sell it after Halloween. >


some kind of costume exchange where you buy a quality costume and sell it after Halloween.

Austin TX had a place like this that jusssssst closed at the end of 2022, after 38 years in business. "Lucy in Disguise with Diamonds" on South Congress
They had cheap shit if you wanted cheap, but they also had decent outfits that you could buy, or "rent" for a weekend for like a third of the purchase price. e.g. a dinner-theater-quality costume would sell for $100 or rent for $35
I went by there last fall after they announced they were closing soon & made all sales final. Asked the store manager why they were closing; he said "it's just time". 
More like, time to cash out & retire in style. I've read online that LSD's owner bought her building in 2002 and the land it's sitting on is appraised at $1.2MM; there's bound to be a new condo tower or lux hotel that would probably pay $5MM or more for that location.