It may be the most wonderful time of the year for those receiving gifts, but for many of those who sell them it’s simply the most important time of the year.

“For us the Christmas season—the 24 days in December—represents 25% of our annual business,” said Teri Hustins, who owns three small toy stores downtown.

And for local retailers this December was especially important following a difficult few years. The pandemic dropped downtown pedestrian traffic significantly, though it has since rebounded, while commercial rent (like local real estate in general) has climbed in recent years.

For small toy stores, especially, December is a crucial stretch of the year and the week before Christmas is the crucial stretch of the month. But what happens when that week they’re counting on happens to be interrupted by multiple big winter storms that all but shut down the region?

“I’ve been retailing for 32 years downtown,” Hustins said, “and have never seen a snowstorm in the last few days of the Christmas holiday shopping season.” Even the infamous Blizzard of ‘96 at least had the decency to arrive just after Boxing Day.

But this month’s onset of snow and ice all shut down the majority of south Island transportation last week, leaving most locals stuck at home (and some stuck in airports all over the country).

B. Woodward of Cherry Bomb Toys said that shopping and snow collided even harder because this year’s December shopping hadn’t started really picking up until a few weeks in.

“And then at the end of that week, it was snow, and everything,” he said on Saturday, “It just messed up everybody. And then just in the last three days, we started seeing people and they're going bonkers because it was like, ‘Christmas is here! We didn’t realize how quick it is! Oh, no.’”

Shipping delays made it hard to quickly restock

Paws on Cook, which sells toys and gifts for pets, told Capital Daily that shopping was less busy and less constant than expected, due to the storm.

“It normally would just be steady, crazy all day,” sales associate Sharon Hoffman said on Friday, “and instead, it’s sort of the windows of weather that are allowing people to come when that window opens.”

But the bigger issue has been stock: They have enough pet food, but with all deliveries delayed some toys and other items holiday shoppers want have been selling out before restocks arrive.

“We had deliveries that were supposed to arrive on Monday not arrive until Thursday,” Hoffman said, but she expected that by this post-holiday week things would restabilize.

Getting staff into the store was tougher than getting customers in

Hustins told Capital Daily on Friday that foot traffic wasn’t a big issue for her downtown sibling stores Kaboodles, Oscar and Libby’s, and Two Otters. Those stores have prominent locations and had stocked up in advance due to supply chain uncertainty.

The challenge proved to be actually getting people in to run the shops, and making sure that everyone was safe. Many of the workers rely on the bus to get to work, when transit was suspended they had no easy way to get downtown.

The problem was similar up in Sidney. A Buddies Toys worker told Capital Daily that shoppers were still coming into the store, located right on Beacon Avenue, but many of the young people who work there rely on the bus, and couldn’t get in without it running.

The store even ended up losing its heat at one point, another complication that forced it to adjust its hours and prompted the owner to post a special message thanking staff for getting the store through the winter crisis.

Hustins’ three sibling stores managed to have enough downtown-based staff between them to make it work.

“We were able to kind of deploy people into different stores, not where they were originally scheduled,” Hustins said, to “get the stores open with skeleton crews.”

Stores had to juggle multiple challenges

Once the people were in, the focus became safety: Things like trying to keep the floors from getting too cluttered as snowy customers bustled through the small spaces, and closing early enough that staff could get home before ice set in.

Hustins said the whole team banded together, helping each other and driving each other home, because they knew how crucial this stretch of the year was for everyone. The stores actually ended up having strong—even record—sales in the middle of the week, after the first snow day cleared up in the afternoon and then the public rushed to try to finish shopping before the late-week snowstorm.

Still, typical holiday retail priorities like keeping each store stocked up had to take a back seat when “the focus has been leaking roofs at the toy store and dealing with the snow.”

Cherry Bomb had to triage even more, with Woodward abandoning his work on moving things from the store’s current Broad location to the future Yates one so that he could instead keep the storefront staffed while employees were stuck at home.

Clearer streets would have made a difference, owner says

Woodward feels that the advisories to stay home were justified, but that the city didn’t do enough to get the shoppers that did end up downtown to frequent the local shops. He kept his storefront area cleared, as owners and business are required to, and got decent foot traffic. But he argues that downtown as a whole wasn’t cleared enough for pedestrians to easily get to other local shops, and said he knows owners on un-cleared streets who saw few visitors.

Without clear streets, he feels, the mall gets even more appealing as a warm indoor one-stop-shop, and small local storefronts lose out. He thinks the Victoria should expect this more extreme weather to be the new norm.

Victoria mayor Marianne Alto recently acknowledged that the city could do more to handle the increasingly major snowfalls, telling the Times Colonist that council may pre-emptively boost the snow budget for 2023.

Woodward said the snow problems get at a broader issue of accessibility in downtown Victoria, which is full of heritage buildings that often lack the infrastructure for people with wheelchairs or other mobility needs. Addressing that was a big priority for Cherry Bomb and its companion the National Toy Museum of Canada when seeking a new space after losing their home of 13 years on Broad.

“We’ve had people support the museum and they’ve never been in it, because they don’t have the ability to go up the stairs.”

The new location they just found, the former home of The Patch, has enough room to put a ramp in. He’ll get back to that move-in work this week now that the dual chaos of weather and Christmas chaos is over.

He hopes that even though all the snow has melted, people’s desire to get downtown and support local shops will remain.