Rachel Quednau is the program director for Strong Towns, an urban planning think tank focused on incremental development. She writes that Spirit Halloween's business model is based on utilizing otherwise unusable retail space. "Today's Spirit is pretty much a bottom-feeder business that works only at the expense of other stores," Quednau writes. "If there weren't vacant storefronts, this business wouldn't exist."
This is awfully inflamatory. Why exactly is this company a bottom-feeder? How does it work at others' expense? It's utilizing an underutilized resource and providing some income to landlords that they otherwise wouldn't have.
That I can see there's nothing bad or predatory about what they're doing. If they didn't have physical space, they would (and probably are) sell directly online or pay larger rents in other spaces.
Thousands of pumpkin patches and Christmas tree lots follow the same pattern for ages.