HOLLYWOOD — The lights are still up along the Boulevard, and will be for another week or two, but the merchants who sell beneath them have already turned to the calculation that governs the next two months: how far the December money will stretch into a January that never brings much of its own.
“Three good weeks,” said Halina Brozek, who has run a souvenir-and-gift shop near the Walk of Fame for eleven years. “That’s what December is. Three good weeks that have to carry me through eight bad ones. Every year the three weeks are about the same and the eight weeks get a little worse.”
The pattern is old, but merchants along the route say the winter trough has deepened. The holiday crowds arrive, spend, and photograph the decorations, and then, in the first week of January, they vanish, leaving the Boulevard to the residents, the tour buses and whatever tourists brave the rain. This year the merchants face the lull with the repaving fencing still up and a promised completion pushed to spring.
“January, the tourists that come are the die-hards, and the die-hards don’t buy magnets,” said Brozek. “They came to see the stars in the sidewalk, half of which are behind a fence right now. They take their picture, they get cold, they leave.”
A few doors down, a man who sells vintage movie posters said he treated the winter as a fixed cost, like rent. He orders less, staffs thinner, and in the worst weeks closes on the slowest weekday entirely, a decision he said he made reluctantly the first year and now makes without a second thought.
The holiday dining trade told a similar story this season, running cautious and lean, and the retailers expect the restaurants to spend January the way they will: waiting.
Not everyone is grim about it. Brozek said the quiet months were also when she caught up — reordered stock, fixed the things that broke in the rush, took the vacation she could never take in December. The slow season, she allowed, had its uses, so long as you had banked enough of December to survive it.
She keeps a rough ledger in her head of how each winter ran, and said the trend line worried her more than any single January. The three good weeks are not getting better. The construction has not helped. And the tourists, she has noticed, spend a little less carefully than they used to, as if they, too, were watching a January of their own coming.
“I’ll be here in March,” she said, ringing up one of the last holiday sales of the year, a snow globe with the Hollywood sign inside it. “I’ve made it to March eleven times. I just don’t want to keep finding out each year whether this is the winter I don’t.”