This Year’s Elmo
Now that the biggest shopping weekend of the year is over, how many Angelenos successfully bought this year’s hottest kids’ gift item, the Furby?
Almost none.
Even before the retail extravaganza started, most L.A. toy stores were already sold out of this season’s must-have gift that makes the past Tickle Me Elmo craze look half-hearted. A saleswoman from Glendale’s FAO Schwartz said the store was already sold out of Furbies, and wouldn’t get any more until after Christmas. Both KB Toys and Toys ‘R’ Us employees said that their stores were currently sold out.
An interactive fur ball, Tiger Electronic’s Furby toy is disturbingly life-like thanks to a computer chip and infrared sensors. It responds to touch, sound and movement. It can “learn” to speak English. If one Furby starts to laugh, other Furbies near it will start laughing too.
As for the shortage, don’t look for relief on the Internet. eToys, the largest online toy retailer, said it is having the same inventory problems that other stores are suffering. FAO Schwartz’s online site has been sold out for weeks and now has a waiting list of more than 2,000 Furby-hopefuls.
The downright desperate might consider an online auction site, where the toys which have a suggested retail price of about $30, are going for more than $200.
Snowed In
Shoppers at the Panorama Mall got a taste of winter despite the 80-degree-plus temperatures in the San Fernando Valley on the weekend before Thanksgiving.
In partnership with Radio Disney, Panorama Mall brought 15 tons of snow to the shopping center, creating a winter playground for the thousands of kids who showed up.
“They took bales of hay and made a mountain and put the snow on the mountain so the kids could go sliding off,” said Louise Marquez, general manager of the mall.
North Hollywood Ice Co., which provided the snow by grinding 300-pound blocks of ice, does most of its business supplying snow for movie and television productions. But each year during the holiday season, the company gets requests to bring snow to at least a dozen shopping centers around Southern California.
In addition to malls and tourist attractions like Universal Citywalk and Universal Studios Hollywood, private homeowners are snowing up their front lawns for holiday parties, said Tony Floria, North Hollywood Ice Co.’s office manager.
At a price tag of $1,200 for every 10 tons of snow, enough to cover a 40- by-40-foot area, all that frozen atmosphere doesn’t come cheap. Floria says his business has some of his friends back East baffled.
“Back there, you would pay to have it removed,” Floria said. “Here, people pay to put it down. This is California.”
Belated Boasting
No one can accuse Long Beach city officials of jumping the gun.
The city last week issued a press release proclaiming that it had garnered the highest ranking among L.A. County communities for quality of life.
But that ranking, put out annually by the Meyers Group residential real estate information company, was actually released almost a year ago.
The Meyers Group expects to put out the 1999 edition of its 150-page “Forecast and Review” in another month or so, according to Lorry Lynn, senior managing director.
