The Art of Figuring It Out (Spooky Edition)

Before I ever worked in Recruiting & HR, I spent three seasons at a Halloween store…the kind that appears in whatever abandoned building you least expect.

Every year meant a new address, a new manager, and a new cast of people who somehow turned empty shelves and pure confusion into a functioning business.

If you’ve ever walked through one, you already know the vibe: half haunted house, half fire hazard, 100% chaos.

And somehow, every season, the lights came on, the fog machines sputtered to life, and people left happy.

Whether it was zip-tying a display together or taping together ripped packaging, we always figured it out.

Year One: The Haunted Babies-R-Us

Our first store was an old Babies-R-Us that had been vacant for two years. The poles were mint green, the word “Diapers” still hung in giant letters, and the floors were coated in grime from where the shelves used to be. The bathrooms were a war crime.

Trucks arrived whenever they felt like it. Nobody knew what was in them until the boxes came off the dolly. Sometimes we got fifty, sometimes two hundred, and the packing list was never right. Occasionally a huge box would hold one lonely item at the bottom. Other times, we’d open one to find five hundred cans of the same purple hair spray.

I avoided the register like the plague and stuck to the floor, where I reorganized displays and quietly watched for shoplifters. People stole everything: fake knives, clown wigs, fog machines. Retail theft—but make it spooky.

The soundtrack was the same every day: Jimmy Buffett, Crowded House, and a few other classics on loop. Cheeseburger in Paradise became an unofficial theme song for survival.

When teardown week came, we packed the store in record time and then waited five hours for the truck that never arrived because of a blizzard. We watched snow bury our cars through the glass doors. No one said a word.

Then, the entire staff of a nearby location quit the day after Halloween, so we packed away their store too.

Retail teaches patience you never wanted.

Year Two: The Mall Office Without a Bathroom Door

The next year, we moved into a former physical therapy office inside a mall. It was cleaner, but the bathroom had no door, so we used the public one down the hall. The light switches were hidden deep in a maintenance tunnel, which meant whoever opened the store each morning took a quick horror-movie stroll before sunrise.

The manager that year was steady and reasonable—he made a career out of this. Halloween, then Christmas, then Easter mall displays. I could never manage that level of uncertainty, but for him it worked.

The rest of the crew was a mix of teenagers, returning staff, and one employee who went by the name of a ringed planet. She signed legal documents with a tiny planet doodle. By week two, nobody blinked.

Retail normalizes things that would never fly anywhere else.

The same soundtrack looped again. Don’t Dream It’s Over played four times a day, which felt both taunting and supportive.

Still, the team clicked. Everyone figured out their part and quietly kept the place running. Turns out, stability doesn’t come from structure—it comes from people deciding they won’t let things fall apart.

Year Three: The Darkness of a Vacant Sears

By year three, I’d accepted that “figuring it out” was the whole job description. This time we were inside a closed Sears—huge, echoing, and mostly dark. Only a small section was open; the rest was sealed off behind temporary walls.

I built displays and set up animatronics: lunging zombies, screaming clowns, fog machines that coughed more than they smoked. Customers screamed, laughed, and took pictures. We considered that positive feedback.

Every night before closing, I had to walk the full perimeter with my phone flashlight, checking doors that hadn’t opened in years. The building was too quiet—the kind of quiet that makes you walk faster for reasons you don’t discuss.

The team was small and easygoing. Everyone did their job, helped where needed, and shared snacks during slow hours. It wasn’t glamorous, but it worked.

When the season ended, the space turned into a Planet Fitness that I now regularly frequent. Definitely not as spooky anymore.

How to Make This Chaos Work in Your Favor

Three seasons at a Halloween store doesn’t sound like career gold. But every so-called “weird” job teaches you something you’ll use later, even if it takes a few years to see it.

The ones we write off — retail, food service, temp gigs, that one chaotic summer job — are usually where you actually learn how to work. Not the theory of work. The practice.

You learn how to stay calm when everything breaks at once. How to make decisions when no one’s giving direction. How to keep a sense of humor when the fog machine catches fire and a customer demands a refund for a costume you’ve never stocked.

It’s not just “filler experience” when it turned into real training for any role that involves people, pressure, or unpredictability (which is most of them).

So if you’re wondering what to do with those odd jobs on your resume, use them when they tell the story better than the polished ones. You don’t need to list every shift you ever worked, just the ones that show what you actually learned.

The retail job, the diner shifts, the front-desk chaos — all of it taught you how to work with people, solve problems, and keep your cool when the fog machine (literal or metaphorical) starts smoking.

Because whether it’s a haunted Babies-R-Us or your current nine-to-five, the goal’s the same: turn on the lights, deal with what shows up, and make it look easy.