Santa Maria Retail Stores Shocked by Holiday Sales

With the hustle and bustle of the holiday season over, retail stores on the Central Coast are number-crunching their sales to find out how they did.

Jodi Montgomery runs Wildflower Women in the Santa Maria Town Center Mall. She said holiday shoppers brought her business up 25% in sales this past Christmas.

“We had a really good turnout, lots of sales, lots of traffic in the malls,” Montgomery said.

Wildflower Women has been in business since 2009. Montgomery is crossing her fingers that the increase in sales is a sign of what is to come in 2015.

“If sales continue, we’ll have to double up our staff, and that’s not a problem for us because we’re ready.”

Jacob Meza, store manager at One Way, said his store also fared well this holiday season.

“We had a good turnout. A lot of people showed up in the mall, and we did really good, better than we did last year,” Meza said.

Meza told KCOY/KEYT’s Cory James it was so busy that they “ran out [of merchandise] a little quicker than [they] hoped.”

The National Retail Federation said shoppers spent over $600 billion in November and December.

Dave Cross, economic development director for the Santa Maria Chamber of Commerce, said he is “hoping that that trend continues because that signifies that the economy is doing much better and people are spending more money.”