It’s getting more expensive to fill my Halloween trick-or-treat bowl each year as the bags at the store get pricier but smaller. First Trump took egg. Then he took video game. Now he take candy.
I normally wait until the last minute to pick up candy for Halloween. This entails going to the supermarket during my lunch break on Halloween only to find that all of the Halloween-themed bags have already been replaced with Christmas ones. This usually leaves me with no option but to buy the only candy that normally comes individually wrapped in bulk: blow-pops and stacks and stacks of fun-sized chocolate bars. Beggars can’t be choosers. I pay whatever the Halloween gods demand. No child will leave my house emptyhanded on All Hallows’ Eve.
This year I broke with tradition and headed to the supermarket a few nights ahead of time. The pickings were still slim but not altogether terrible. The prices, on the other hand, stopped me in my tracks. It was supposed to be a quick shop. In and out. Instead, I stared at the bags of Snickers and Reece’s Cups like I was picking which arm to get amputated. A big bag of assorted Hershey’s candy was almost $17. That couldn’t be right. I checked again. Ouch. I went for a small bag of Butterfingers. It was $6.59. That would not be nearly enough. Five smaller bags or two bigger ones? Either way, I was getting hosed.
The irony, of course, is that I do not need nearly this much candy. I always have a ton left over, sitting in the bowl and rotting my teeth through mid-November. But what if this year is different? What if busses of children roll up to my street demanding dispensation? Better safe than sorry. And so I pay to subsidize the fat cats at Mars and Hershey. Apparently I have it easy. One particularly grim thread on the inflation subreddit tells a different story.
“I just spent $95 on 4 small bags of candy bar minis (110 mini pieces per bag), and 1 bag of jolly rancher gummy minis that will not get me through the night,” it reads. Some say they’ll just hide in their bedrooms that night watching TV with the lights out. Others are downgrading to cheaper candy. “Stopped doing chocolate and candy bars as that is where inflation is taking the biggest hit,” one person wrote. “Gummy and hard candies are still reasonable. $16 got us like 80 small packs of sour patch kids and when there are gone, they’re gone. Lights out. No more.”
Tariffs and bad cocoa harvests
Is candy actually getting way more expensive? Why yes, yes it is. NBC News reports that multiple years of bad cocoa harvests in regions like West Africa, due in part to rising temperatures and changing climate conditions, have created a shortage that’s led to skyrocketing prices. “The cost of chocolate has surged nearly 30% since last Halloween,” reports Fox News.
But gummies and other non-chocolate candy is also up. “General manufacturing costs for candy makers, including energy, labor and transportation, have risen 37 percent since early 2024,” one supply chain analyst told NBC News. One TikTok deal hunter told the outlet that her normal go-to discount tricks have still gone from $1.50 a bag to $2.50 in some cases this year.
And of course there’s the Trump tariff factor. “The tariffs have hit every single piece of what goes into every single thing,” a small chocolate business owner in North Carolina told CNN. “There is no new normal.” As The Guardian reports, “Donald Trump has placed tariffs on the biggest exporters of chocolate to the US. Imports from the Ivory Coast, the largest producer of cocoa, are taxed with a 21 percent tariff. Ecuador, the second-largest producer, faces a 15 percent tariff.” Prices of Tootsie Roll lollipops alone are up 30 percent on average this year, according to a recent report by The Century Foundation.
