HOLLYWOOD — The gift trade is the last good hope of a hard year for the small shops along Hollywood Boulevard and its side streets, and the owners are approaching it the way you approach a bet you cannot afford to lose: carefully, and with less on the table than last time.
Foot traffic has been down for months, merchants say, a mix of a soft economy, the ongoing repaving that has fenced off stretches of the Boulevard since spring, and the slow production year that has thinned the crowd of working film and television people who used to shop on lunch breaks. The holidays are supposed to make up the difference. Whether they will is the question nobody can answer until January.
“I ordered maybe thirty percent less inventory than I did two years ago,” said Devon Achterberg, who runs a gift and stationery shop off the Boulevard. “If I sell out early, that’s a good problem. What I can’t do is get stuck in February with shelves full of Christmas I paid for. That’s how a small store dies.”
The shops are counting, too, on the season’s second wave: the awards-season visitors who begin arriving after the new year, when the industry’s parties and screenings draw people with money and time to wander. A gift shop can live a surprising amount of its year on the weeks between Thanksgiving and the end of February, several owners said, if the tourists come and the rain holds off.
The rain is its own worry. A wet December empties the sidewalks fast, and the merchants who depend on walk-in browsers have no way to make it up. “People forget it rains here,” said Corinne Bhandari, who sells vintage clothing and costume jewelry a few doors from a shuttered storefront. “When it does, my street goes dead. Nobody strolls in a downpour.”
Some owners have adjusted in small ways. A few have pooled money for shared shopping-night events, staying open late together so a quiet block feels less quiet. Others have leaned harder on the regulars who live nearby, the ones who will buy a gift from a neighbor on principle even when the same thing is a click away and a dollar cheaper.
“I can’t beat the internet on price and I stopped trying,” Achterberg said. “What I sell is that you can hold the thing, and I’ll wrap it, and if it’s wrong you bring it back and we sort it out like people. Some shoppers still want that. I need enough of them.”
The city’s repaving project, which merchants had hoped would be finished by now, remains a sore point. Crews have promised the fencing along key blocks will come down before the holiday rush. The shop owners, who have heard promises like it before, are decorating their windows and hoping the sidewalk in front of them is open when the customers finally come.