Skeletons in swim trunks. Candy corn next to sunscreen. Welcome to Summerween.

Eighty-one percent of people say they are planning to celebrate Halloween this year. Nearly half of shoppers now say they start buying in September or earlier. That’s not incremental; that’s a structural pull-forward of demand into a period retailers used to treat as filler.

If you’ve walked a Target or Dollar Tree aisle in the last few weeks and wondered why the candy corn is sharing shelf space with sunscreen, you’re not imagining things. Welcome to Summerween, and it’s not a gimmick anymore. It’s a retail strategy. READ The Lempert Report on Substack.