With only weeks to go before Halloween night, many of us are dusting off old costumes or looking to buy or create new outfits. There are more options than ever now to get one thanks to the Internet. Many people go to one of those Halloween pop-up stores that appear in our local shopping malls this time of year. Others turn to Amazon or other online stores to find the right costume. Now, the emergence of the online sharing economy is giving people still another option that a few years ago wasn't available.
A new survey by the folks at Listia shows that more people than ever are going online and trading away their items in an effort to declutter their homes and find new Halloween garb. Of all the people searching for a new getup, almost 30 percent said they now do it this way. If you haven't heard of it, the sharing economy is a peer-to-peer socio-economic system that is built around the sharing of resources. It includes the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services by different people. This takes a variety of forms, often bringing information technology in to help people by allowing for better distribution. The world is really embracing the sharing economy in the form of companies like ride-sharing service Uber, travel accommodation company Airbnb and task-assignment company TaskRabbit, among many others.
According to the survey, the holidays are a perfect time of year for people to clean out old stuff they don't want. More than 30 percent of respondents said, in general, they like to give away what they no longer need before and during holidays like Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and others. According to data, the amount of Halloween goods on these sites has grown more than six times in the last month. The following infographic shows not only how people are finding the right costume, but what they can do if they want to trade their old costumes using an online sharing marketplace. The graphic also shows where all that clutter is ending up, whether to charity or to family.
