Getting the masses in the mood
Thousands of lights were twinkling. No fewer than 178 banners festooned the streets. The 60-foot white fir trucked in from Northern California was anchored fast. Santa was in his log cabin. And before dawn the shoppers began streaming in.
All day Friday they came in throngs to the sprawling Victoria Gardens open-air town center in Rancho Cucamonga. “Thanksgiving is over, cooking is done and now we’re on to Christmas,” Darla Steffen said.
Shopping with her daughter and granddaughters, Steffen said she loved the outdoor feel and “of course, our California sunshine. Where else could you shop like this at the end of November? Right, girls?”
Preparation paid off here, as it did at practically every mall and Main Street across the country Friday. Merchants across Southern California were generally optimistic about what they were seeing.
“We live for this day,” said KB Toys store supervisor Lupe Avilla, sporting a bright red Santa hat at Lakewood Center mall. “It’s definitely one of the days of the year where you feel the connection with your shoppers.”
At the nearby Target, manager Cindy Radovich was upbeat. “In just about 20 minutes, we’ve seen all the TVs go.” By noon, she said, the store had rung up about 4,300 transactions, up 25% from the same few hours last year.
Victoria Gardens, opening for its third holiday season, is one of the largest regional malls in Southern California. It was built in 2004 on former agricultural land in burgeoning Rancho Cucamonga.
The young, upwardly mobile city is a keystone in the rapidly growing Inland Empire of San Bernardino and Riverside counties. What happens here and at similar shopping destinations in the next 30 days will be a prime measure of consumers’ moods about the economy and their prospects for the coming year.
“It will be a good Christmas for premium goods,” predicted analyst Michael J. Silverstein of Boston Consulting Group. Middle-class shoppers generally feel secure about their jobs, aren’t too worried about housing prices and are willing to upgrade on purchases for the home such as computers -- though they will try to find products on sale, he said.
The seasonal action at Victoria Gardens began a week before Friday’s official kickoff with lights, bows and ornaments. And tucked behind rooftop facades are machines that will blast fake snow made with a secret formula. Each night, the snow shoots from the rooftops and settles lightly on customers below.
The scramble to finish setting the scene was the culmination of months of preparations for the holidays. The annual ritual is acted out at shopping centers across the country as retailers go all out to spark the gift-giving urge in their customers.
“The intention is to create the holiday spirit,” said Kurt Barnard, president of Barnard’s Retail Consulting Group. “There is a special mental attitude that retailers count on when they prepare for the holiday shopping season.”
At Victoria Gardens, the owners hope to create an enduring Christmas tradition from scratch. Shawn Antrim, 40, and his family from nearby La Verne are already hooked. He helped build the Macy’s store and comes back every year for the holidays.
“I’m not a big shopper myself,” he said, but his mother and father drive 15 hours from Oregon just for the annual outing here. “We like the shops here more than the Grove,” said Antrim’s wife, Margot, referring to the open-air shopping center in Los Angeles.
Victoria Gardens marketing director Glenn Miller wants to establish an annual event for thousands of Inland Empire families by borrowing imagery from Norman Rockwell, Charles Dickens and assorted Americana.
Santa’s Depot, for instance, is meant to suggest the darkly funny 1983 film “A Christmas Story,” about a boy’s 1940s holiday in a small Midwestern city. The movie still delights Miller, who grew up in tiny Aurora, Ind.
“That’s the era we want to evoke,” he said. “I was going for nostalgia.”
Planning for Santa began in the spring, when Miller coordinated plans with Sepia Photo Promotions. The Texas company supplies professionally jolly men with real white beards. Red-suited Al Johnson, who is negotiating youngsters’ pleas at Victoria Gardens for the second season in a row, is one.
Traditional decorations offer the kind of seasonal dissonance Southern Californians often revel in, inviting shoppers to pretend they are in a holiday winter scene while strolling about in shorts and open-toed shoes and listening to Christmas music piped through speakers hidden in drought-resistant shrubbery.
Feeding the feeling is the giant white fir in the town square, trucked in by Vito’s Custom Christmas Trees from a tree farm near Mt. Shasta in Northern California. The family-owned Dana Point company provides some of the biggest holiday trees in the country to such venues as Fashion Island in Newport Beach and the Grove.
Capping the fantasy each night are convincing artificial snowfalls that powder the town square for up to 15 minutes. Traditional tunes such as -- surprise -- “Let It Snow” and “Winter Wonderland” set the beat.
Former Cleveland magician Adam Williams developed the “snow” formula as part of an illusion for his theatrical show.
Then he set up a Los Angeles-based business that drops the white stuff at celebrations in such non-frigid locations as Dolphin Mall in Miami and the Ala Moana Center in Honolulu.
The snow is made from a water-based non-chemical foam with a dash of mint scent to create the impression of a chill in the air, Williams said.
Victoria Gardens’ bid to start a small-town holiday tradition is aided by the fact that Rancho Cucamonga is a young city without a historic core. It was formed in 1977 by the merging of the unincorporated agricultural communities of Alta Loma, Cucamonga and Etiwanda.
Forest City Enterprises Inc. and Lewis Retail Centers opened the $300-million, 160-acre complex in 2004 near the 10, 210 and 15 freeways. To make it feel more like an old-fashioned Main Street than a mall, they arranged it in 12 blocks with 30 buildings intended to suggest a range of eras.
“The developers really wanted to define Victoria Gardens as a central gathering spot,” Miller said.
City leaders also built a cultural center next door that included a library and performing arts center. Watching over the lobby is a bronze statue of comedian Jack Benny, who had a running gag on his radio show about trains leaving “for Anaheim, Azusa and Cuc ... amonga.”
Christmas “is the biggest event in the retail industry and make-it-or-break-it season for many,” consultant Barnard said. “That is why it is important that they get people to anticipate the holiday.”
For Miller and his management staff of 30, that means putting in 12-hour days six or seven times a week throughout the holiday rush.
“There are days when it’s tiring,” he said, “but there’s nothing like standing in the town square during a snowfall and watching kids scream with joy catching snow on their tongues. It’s all worth it at that point.”
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adrian.uribarri@latimes.com
Times staff writer Francisco Vara-Orta contributed to this report.
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Victoria Gardens at a glance
* Location: Near the 10, 15 and 210 freeways in Rancho Cucamonga
* Construction cost: $300 million
* Opened: 2004
* Owners: Forest City Enterprises Inc. and Lewis Retail Centers
* Size: 1.5 million square feet
with more than 150 shops and eateries
* Largest businesses: Macy’s, JC Penney and AMC Theatres
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Los Angeles Times
