Spirit billboard goes up near Chicago Costume

He had been at Chicago Costume about 18 months when, arriving at work the other day, he glanced up and noticed the new billboard. He laughed out loud at its audacity, he said. “It felt egregious, obvious and, honestly, hilarious to see very different worlds, corporate and family, within eyeshot.” So he began tweeting about it, and tweeting about it, noting the billboard, the placement, the benefits of a local, year-round costume shop. His initial tweet went viral. It’s not the first time that a wry Chicago tweet about Spirit took off recently: Photoshopped images of a Spirit banner across a potentially vacated Soldier Field went viral. But therein lies the fear: Spirit can come off shameless in its eagerness to dominate Halloween. “I didn’t take their billboard exactly as a sign of aggression,” said Courtland Hickey, Chicago Costume general manager. “But there is no other reason to have that billboard at that location. The irony is (since the tweet), it’s had the opposite effect and helped business.”