Well, it's been a while since I've posted a list like this but with Halloween only 5 days away there's no time like the present.  As I said last year, fly-by-night costume shops pop up all over the place, and there are numerous quality websites making it easier than ever to find the perfect costume for a party or trick-or-treating.

Not all costumes are created equally however, and I'm not talking about the quality of material used. It would seem in an effort to fill more shelves, some costume makers will mass produce any idea suggested to them.

For the second year in a row, I have found a few of the worst mass-produced costume ideas out there. Yes, there are certainly worse, more offensive, tasteless, or downright poor quality costumes out there, but many I have come across are home-made or one-of-a-kind and not likely to be available at a Halloween USA.

There are certainly other costumes that could be on this list, but in keeping with a top five, I had to pick only one from each of the follow categories: adult male, adult female, youth male, youth female, infant.

Adult Male: Michael Jackson

Last year it was Heath Ledger's Joker, this year it's Michael Jackson. When a celebrity dies, apparently everyone thinks the best way to reflect on their life is to dress up like them for Halloween. Not surprisingly there have been a huge number of Michael Jackson costumes being made this year, with a vast majority of them being related to his Thriller costume. Really? You want to dress up like Jackson when he was dancing with the undead? This may have been a semi-creative costume idea to wear last year, but now it's about as unoriginal as you can get.

Adult Female: Kate Gosselin

Beside an ugly wig, your "costume" is basically an act... one that requires you to be an obnoxious attention seeker who nags all the men at the party all night. What better way to be the life of the party? There's not much else to say about this costume other than it's not even remotely fun or funny.

Youth Male: Balloon Boy

Yes, this is a real costume. You knew someone was going to rush to capitalize on this story before the hype fades. Microflight.com were the ones to do it, just as people have stopped caring. Besides not being funny, there's nothing in this costume that requires you to spend a lot of money:

A cardboard box... free.
A name tag...  $3.00 for a pack of 40
A silver mylar balloon turned sideways... $1
If you want to be more accurate, you can take a strip of cardboard from your free cardboard box, tape it into a circle, spray paint it silver and tape that to the bottom of the balloon... $5 (for the paint)
Or... you can pay $19.99 for the same stuff (not assembled) from Microflight plus express shipping to get it here in time for Halloween.

You read that right... they are charging you $20 + shipping to ship you a deflated balloon and a cardboard box inside another cardboard box.

Youth Female: The TRAVELOCITY Gnome

There are a lot of bad costumes out there for kids, but this one is just downright confusing.  In the end, this was the worst choice for a few reasons:

1) It's a corporate mascot for a travel plan company
2) The entire concept of the roaming gnome is not their idea but the costume is branded with Travelocity.
3) The costume is being marketed to girls for some reason

What girl doesn't dream of dressing up like a male gnome and promoting price guarantees? What's that? None of them do? Oh, then I guess you must work for Travelocity and got this costume as SWAG.

Infant: Air Freshener

Odds are your baby doesn't smell pine fresh and won't enjoy being carried around inside this monstrosity. Even the kid they used for the ad looks miserable. This costume screams: "My mommy went shopping this afternoon and this was all that was left." For goodness sake there are more creative costumes for dogs out there than this.