PONTIAC, Mich. — On Oct. 15, the Willow Creek Neighborhood Association installed a Candy Czar.
The post went to Dale Prewitt, 54, a retired freight-logistics manager who had already, for eleven consecutive Halloweens, managed his own porch by feel. The association felt the neighborhood had outgrown feel. “We have 312 houses,” Prewitt says. “Feel does not scale.”
Prewitt’s first act was the census. Each household reported, on a shared spreadsheet, its projected candy inventory in dollars, count, and king-size equivalents — the neighborhood’s new reserve currency, defined as one full-size king bar, roughly 3.4 ounces. Fun-size pieces were classified as small change. Candy corn was reclassified, after a long meeting, as a structural material, “distributed for morale and available for emergency stacking.”
The census found Willow Creek holding 41,207 pieces of candy on a street of 312 houses, an average of 132 per household, or one full-size bar for every man, woman, and child in the subdivision, with a surplus concentrated, as Surplus always is, in the zip code’s two cul-de-sacs.
It also found the desert. “Nine Mile Road is a sugar desert,” says Priya Raman, a seventh grader who maps her trick-or-treat route with the same app her older brother used to map parking lots. Her team’s reconnaissance — three nights of walking blocks in daylight, counting porches with lights — has identified four houses on the corridor with nothing good. “We don’t go there. We reroute the whole flank.” Her group’s slang for a house that hands out candy corn is “bankrupt.”
The association, meanwhile, has adopted what Prewitt calls the King-Size Equity Doctrine: houses in the first two blocks of foot traffic must stock 150% of projected demand, because they will be visited by everyone twice. Houses at the far end receive a courtesy alert that their inventory “will be reviewed as surplus,” which the far-end homeowners correctly read as a threat and which has, per the spreadsheet, moved 2,000 bars toward the east edge.
A local dentist, appearing on public record and on absolutely nobody’s invitation, urged the neighborhood to “consider apples.” The minutes record the motion as “hearing no second, tabled until 2027.”
The window itself — 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. — will run on air-traffic protocol. Prewitt has designated 6:00 to 7:15 as the surge, asked households with driveways to face their bowls toward the walk, and instructed anyone out of a given candy to close their porch light rather than post an apology, “because an apology is a target.” His own porch will serve king bars exclusively, which the association’s own bylaws technically frown on and which Prewitt defends with the only sentence that has ever ended a candy debate in this subdivision: “I have the inventory.”
At 6:00 p.m. his clipboard will read, as all Halloweens’ clipboards have always read, a full count. By 9:00 he will not update it. He will simply close the clipboard, the way a man closes a ledger on a day the market cleared.