I visited a Halloween store during the pandemic to see what it was like as Americans prepare to spend a projected $8 billion celebrating the holiday

Spirit Halloween store.Mary Meisenzahl/Business Insider

• I visited a Spirit Halloween popup store outside of Rochester, NY.
• The store was surprisingly the biggest sign of life in the mostly empty strip mall.
• Spirit has 1,400 popup stores around the US.

Spirit Halloween stores pop up for the season every year, coronavirus or not. I visited one of the chain's more than 1,000 locations near Rochester, NY to see what a Halloween store is like in the midst of a pandemic.

An estimated 58% of Americans plan to celebrate Halloween, according to the National Retail Federation, and they plan to spend just over $90 per person. This amounts to over $8 billion in planned spending, a high point in the "second wave of the retail apocalypse."

Spirit CEO Steven Silverstein said that when the company announced it would still open stores this year, he knew Halloween was an"outlet for escape." He also noted that retail performance over Halloween could be a predictor of the rest of the holiday season.

Read more: Holiday shopping season started early this year. Here's a checklist to prepare your business for marketing, inventory, shipping, and customer service.

Spirit Halloween, full of skeletons and undead monster costumes, was oddly enough the only sign of life in an otherwise empty strip mall. Despite changes in how Halloween can safely be celebrated this year, customers in the store mostly told me that they planned to dress up.