After Ho-Hum Year : County Malls Say Tills Jingled Over Christmas Season

After a year of ho-hum sales, Orange County shopping malls generally experienced a respectable Christmas season--although only two major malls said that all their wishes were granted.

As usual, Costa Mesa’s South Coast Plaza reported more holiday business than anybody else.

For county-based retailers as a whole--a group that includes automobile dealers--projected taxable sales for 1986 are a comparatively sparse 3.3% above 1985’s $20.2 billion when adjusted for inflation, according to Jim Doti, dean of the School of Business and Management at Chapman College in Orange.

“That’s low,” Doti said, considering that total taxable sales in the county in 1984 grew 11% from the previous year, while the average annual increase for the county’s retailers “typically comes in around 5%.”

The county’s 14 major shopping malls accounted for $1.7 billion in taxable retail sales in 1985. A 3.3% increase would have boosted the 1986 total to just 1.76 billion.

“It was not a booming year,” said a spokesman for Westminster Mall, which consistently ranks among the top 10 in total taxable retail sales in Southern California.

In 1985, according to figures from the State Board of Equalization, Westminster Mall’s 175 merchants tallied total retail sales of $191.8 million. This year, the mall spokesman said, “some stores did very well; others had a hard time making last year’s figures.”

Buena Park Mall Results

Results were slightly better at Buena Park Mall, which met its 1986 projections and finished with a 5% sales revenue increase for the year. The mall’s 1985 taxable retail sales totaled about $123 million.

The seasonal jingle of cash registers was a bit louder at Brea Mall, which saw sales increase about 7% for the holiday season. “It was a better increase than we expected,” said Jim Charter, the mall general manager.

Brea Mall should close 1986 with higher receipts than the $170.8 million tallied in 1985, “but not by that much,” Charter said.

The addition of new stores in a $115-million face lift added to the bottom line at Newport Center Fashion Island, said manager Kathleen Flood, who declined to provide any figures for the year or the holiday season. The Newport Beach mall, according to the State Board of Equalization report, posted $165 million in taxable sales in 1985, the fourth highest total in Orange County.

At the Mall of Orange, marketing director Angie Reppen said sales for the Christmas season were up “around 20%,” but she declined to give sales figures or sales increases for the entire year. The center posted total taxable sales of $108.8 million in 1985.

But at South Coast Plaza--where officials thrive on revealing the mall’s ever-increasing sales tallies--marketing director Maura Eggan said the mall, Orange County’s largest, met its 1986 target of $500 million in sales.

As with most mall officials, Eggan’s sales figures include some items that the state doesn’t tally in its annual reports of taxable retail sales. Thus, Eggan said that South Coast Plaza’s $500-million year reflected an increase of $50 million, or 11%, from 1985’s total sales of $450 million. The state report for 1985, however, credits the Costa Mesa center with $412.5 million in sales and is likely to show a lower gross for 1986 than does Eggan.

Of the center’s total sales for last year, Eggan said, an estimated 15% came in December, giving South Coast Plaza gross sales for the holiday season of about $75 million.

Influence of Additions

Eggan conceded that some of the increased sales for 1986 are traceable to the center’s massive expansion--a $100-million addition called Crystal Court, a new $27-million Nordstrom store and about $20 million in improvements to the existing structures. But even excluding the new stores, the center’s sales were up 10% over last year, Eggan estimated.

If South Coast Plaza meets its 1987 projection of $735 million in gross sales, it could become the largest single concentration of retailing in California, edging out San Francisco’s Union Square area and the Rodeo Drive/Beverly Hills’ Golden Triangle retail center, industry observers said.

And estimates are that South Coast Plaza--and Orange County malls, in general--will see bigger numbers this year.

The county has some of the Southland’s most affluent consumers, and those consumers will have more disposable dollars this year, according to both Doti and Robert Peterson, vice president and retail specialist at Coldwell Banker in Anaheim. Doti said he believes disposable incomes will increase because the new income tax law will result in reductions in many wage earners’ federal withholding.