Late start in Santa Rosa to holiday shopping rush after October fires

Across Santa Rosa, busy shopkeepers on Friday said they had noticed an obvious delay this year in holiday retail bustle, and the prime culprit isn’t hard to guess.

While holiday sales were expected to rise up to $682 billion nationwide - up to 4 percent over last year’s spending, according to a report from the National Retail Federation - locally the shopping rush took a little longer than normal to get started, retailers say, yet another effect of destructive wildfires that raged across the North Bay in October.

At Railroad Square’s California Welcome Center, manager Myrna Lozada said the number of visitors at the start of the holiday season was cut nearly in half compared to 2016, but a crush of visitors during December has made up for it.

“We’re gaining steam,” Lozada said. “October was tough, but we’re pulling out real quick.”

Overall, visitors to the centrally located tourist hub for the final three months of the year were up 8 percent over the same period last year. The gain likely would have been much greater given the nearby launch of SMART rail service had it not been for the scarcity of visitors in October and the first half of November, Lozada said.

As for many others, the fires meant Vanessa Davies and her mother, Patricia Lansdowne, got a later start on holiday shopping than usual.

For Lansdowne, an attorney who lives in Rohnert Park, much of the delay resulted from the closure of the courts during the fires, which in turn created a case backlog.

“Been too busy,” said Lansdowne, fresh off purchasing a new iPad for her daughter at the downtown Santa Rosa Plaza. “It’s been really busy at the courthouse. We’re trying to catch up.”

Matt Jensen and his friend, Erick Madrigal, were also doing some last-minute gift shopping Friday at the mall. Jensen, bag in-hand at Macy’s, commented on the conspicuously light crowd.

“It’s supposed to be pretty hectic, and as you can see it’s not,” he said. “I feel like there’s not a lot of holiday cheer. It’s pretty dead. I think a lot of us gave a lot of money to charities and stuff, and all of a sudden Christmas comes up, so you’ve gotta wait for that last paycheck.”

Angela Parrish, who manages Fanzz, a sports apparel shop inside the mall, said business has been slow for her shop this season. She attributed the drop to the fires, but also to underwhelming seasons for Bay Area professional sports teams.

“I’m seeing a lot more later shoppers. I think the fires might have had something to do with it, definitely a lot of people coming in looking for replacements of things, which is really sad,” she said.

“It was fire and then Christmas. It felt like there was barely a Thanksgiving. There was no Halloween. I had a lot of people be like, ‘Oh my God, it’s Christmas in like three days. ... It was 20 weeks away and now it’s three days away.”

Along downtown Santa Rosa’s Fourth Street business coordinator, shopkeepers noticed much of the same - both a delay in holiday traffic, and also residents looking to replace belongings they lost in the fires.

Christmas ornaments have been especially popular items, said both Julie Montgomery, who owns Kindred Fair Trade Handcrafts, and Randy Harris, who owns Positively Fourth Street. Both downtown shops were busy with customers out to purchase gifts on their lunch breaks.

“Certainly the fires affected the early part of the season, but we saw a nice flurry of people in November feeling like they needed to come in and buy something for the people who they knew had lost their homes,” Montgomery said.

Inside Positively Fourth Street, Harris took a quick break from ringing up customers buying jewelry, crystals and tie-dye onesies to note the recent rebound in sales.

“We had this big gap in October for a lot of people, and then all of a sudden it’s the holiday season when a lot of people are just busy trying to find a place to live,” he said.

Despite the initial lag in seasonal business, he expects shopping to swell through the weekend with people out doing their last-minute buying.

“It’s a store full of stocking stuffers,” he said, laughing.

You can reach Staff Writer Christi Warren at 707-521-5205 or christi.warren@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @SeaWarren.