What Stock Crash? Holiday Shoppers Spending Big Bucks

Yuppie investment bankers might be tightening their belts on Wall Street, but $440 camel hair sport coats are racing out the door at the downtown Los Angeles Brooks Bros. Manhattan condos might be going begging for buyers, but Southern California parents are snapping up $2,500 playhouses for their kids this Christmas.

The bottom line isn’t known yet. But as Los Angeles retailers headed into the stretch Wednesday in this touch-and-go holiday season, many sighs of relief could be heard now that shoppers have come through--laying out for gifts modest and magnificent.

At Bullock’s downtown location, customers are showing “no resistance to price,” said store manager Kathryn L. McConville. “They’re still looking for quality.”

Hot sellers have been $100 silver picture frames, Waterford clocks, $45 Giorgio Armani ties, $200 leather jackets and Baccarat crystal animals, from $80 to $100. Sales of casual and active ready-to-wear garments were soft, but not so interest in the $2,500 wooden playhouses featured in the department store chain’s holiday catalogue. Nine were sold in 3 1/2 weeks.

Koala Blue, the Australian store on Melrose Avenue, credits the cold snap with making a big market for hand-knit wool sweaters at $150, with splashy aboriginal prints. “Because of the cold spell, everything fleecy and sweaters sold well,” said floor supervisor Robyn Joseph.

For Brooks Bros., that bastion of conservative dressing, the watchword was caution immediately after the Oct. 19 stock market nose dive. Now, the store’s sales are running 13% to 15% over last year’s holiday period--well above expected levels--thanks to strong purchases of cashmere sweaters, at $200 to $300, $180 cuff links and ostrich, alligator and lizard skin wallets, at $90 to $350.

“Ladies shopping for husbands and boyfriends” have selected camel hair sport coats and traditional navy flannel blazers, at $340, with gray flannel trousers, at $140, said assistant store manager David Byrd. “In cashmere sweaters, we have sold probably 40 to 50 in a matter of a week.”

Interestingly, he noted, the lower-price gift items have not done as well, but he expected sales of “stocking stuffers” such as tie racks and aromatic cedar blocks to pick up as procrastinators panic today.

“Shoppers waited a little bit longer this year, scrutinizing things a little bit more,” Byrd said. “They were looking for high quality, things that will last.”

At the Broadway, which apparently had its biggest sales day ever on Saturday, the hottest seller of the season was a $13.99 heart-shaped crystal box by Gorham that was featured on a TV promotion before Thanksgiving and “left the store before we knew what happened,” said William D. (Mac) McDonald Jr., senior vice president for marketing and sales promotion. Among other winners were Stone Mountain handbags at $70 to $162 and moderately priced Waterford crystal gift items.

Jingle Bear, a plush toy sold to customers who have made other purchases, “did not blow out of the store like last year,” McDonald said. But the promotional item, which goes into hibernation Christmas Eve, will definitely be back next year, with a few new twists, he added.

Target, an upscale discount store with 91 Southern California locations, sold out of Pictionary, a pencil-and-paper version of Charades by Games Gang that is the season’s hottest game. “We’ve been out at most stores for a couple of weeks,” said George Hite, a spokesman for Target, which sold the game at a discounted $19.78. In fact, some Target stores are out of toys altogether, he said, noting that the chain had approached the season “rather cautiously given the fairly sluggish year.”

Even at a full-priced $29.95, Imaginarium, an educational toy store, also sold out of Pictionary in its five Southern California stores, along with Fisher-Price kitchen sets at $89.95 and Magna Doodle, a $16.95 sketching-screen product that “has been out for years and years,” said Janet Crain, a buyer for the chain.

This year marked “a return to basics and classics,” she said. “Even simple things like wooden stacking blocks did well.” So did stuffed toys, particularly high-ticket items. Some lucky child will undoubtedly be the only one on his block with a $1,200 kangaroo from France.

The Nature Company, which sells nature-oriented gifts and books through catalogues and retail stores, “expected a slump, and we just didn’t get it,” said spokeswoman Barrie Kerper. Everything related to dinosaurs, from books to inflatables, sold well, as did a $249 handmade thermometer, from a design by Galileo. “The Beverly Hills store cannot keep them in stock for even eight hours,” Kerper said of the thermometers.

Also sold in the Beverly Hills store: one piece of glittering tourmaline, a mineral from Brazil, for a “what, me worry?” price of $19,000.