HOLLYWOOD — Anselm Kirkbride sold 141 pairs of shoes on Friday and Saturday, which is more than he sold in the previous two weeks combined, and he can tell you that without looking, because he has been waiting to say it since May.
“Eighty-nine pairs on Saturday. That is my best Saturday since 2019,” said Mr. Kirkbride, who has sold shoes on the same Boulevard block since 2003 and who told this paper nine days ago that his whole month came down to two days. “I said if the fourteenth and the fifteenth were enormous, I would tell you I worried for nothing. They were enormous. I worried for nothing. Write that down and put the date on it, because I will worry again next May and somebody can bring me the clipping.”
That is the verdict from the weekend the Boulevard’s back-to-school shops had circled on the calendar: the season showed up. Late, compressed into forty-eight hours after payday, exactly where the shopkeepers said it would be — but it showed up, and it spent.
The nuance survives the good news. Mr. Kirkbride’s average ticket was still down; the $44 pair outsold the $58 pair all weekend, “two to one, maybe worse,” and his margin on the two big days was thinner than the same weekend last year. The wall of stock he ordered in May, for an August that no longer exists, is mostly gone. He expects to carry about forty pairs into September, against a normal year’s twenty-five. “That is not a problem anymore,” he said. “That is a shelf.”
On the resale corridor at the neighborhood’s west edge, Odalys Fontenot’s uniform rack by the door — the one she set up for the mothers with school lists — kept selling right through the weekend. That is the detail worth keeping. The premise of this soft, strange season was that a dollar leaving the shoe store was landing on the secondhand rack. The weekend proved something better: both registers rang at once.
“The mothers with the lists did not choose between me and him,” said Ms. Fontenot, fourteen years in the shop and closing out her best August in five or six years. “Khaki and navy from me, the shoes from him. Nobody buys used shoes for a growing child if they can help it. There was enough money this weekend for both of us. There was not enough in July. That is the whole story.”
Off Highland, Guadalupe Serrano — the stationery and school-supply owner this paper quoted anonymously last week, wondering why late customers were apologizing to her — spent her Friday doing something no shopkeeper’s manual recommends: emptying her best shelf on purpose, at cost. Cash donations had covered 28 of the church supply drive’s 40-calculator gap, and on Friday Ms. Serrano sold the drive her last twelve scientific calculators at cost, closing the gap for good. The drive on Franklin sent most of its 1,200 backpacks out the basement door Saturday. She spent that same day redirecting calculator customers, directions written out on receipt paper.
“I have been looking at an empty shelf since Friday night and it is the best feeling I have had all year,” she said. “Which is a strange thing to hear a shopkeeper say about a shelf that is not making her any money. But you did not see the fourteenth in here. The shelf did its work.”
The barber on Cahuenga who added a cheaper cut for children under twelve gets his verdict last. Classes resume across the district this week, and his book for Monday and Tuesday was full by Saturday afternoon. His August, as he predicted, is arriving in its final week, all at once.
So the season’s arithmetic closes out like this: the money came. It came late, it came compressed into a single weekend, and it moved — out of July and into August’s last possible days, from the $58 pair to the $44 pair, from the new racks to the used ones and back again. The shops that planned for how August used to work spent nine days sweating a wall of inventory. The ones that planned for how August works now — a rack by the door, a cheaper cut, a shelf sold down to the wood at exactly the right moment — spent the weekend making change. Mr. Kirkbride, who did his sweating in public, is the one who got away with it. He orders again in May.