Florida Chain Pulls Clown Costumes From Shelves Ahead of Halloween

A chain of stores in Tampa Bay, Fla., has pulled all clown costumes off its shelves in reaction to the creepy clown craze that has been spreading across the U.S. and beyond.

Goodwill-Suncoast decided to stop selling clown costumes and accessories in its 18 retail stores, even though Halloween is just two weeks away, WFLA reports.

“We had a customer come to us who said they were really freaked out by this creepy clown phenomenon,” Chris Ward, of Goodwill-Suncoast Inc, told the channel. “We wanted to be sensitive to that so we decided to pull clown costumes from [our] stores.”

The decision of Goodwill-Suncoast comes just days after shops across the U.K. were warned by police not to sell clown costumes to potential pranksters following a spate of clown-related incidents in the country. However, one store told ITV News that it was not responsible for withdrawing a “technically inoffensive item in response to a fad.”