Retail Sales Slump: Bad Weather a Viable Excuse?
We recently came across this interesting article that we just had to share. Retailers have long been trying to harness industry trends and develop retail strategies to meet rising consumer demands and deal with decreasing retail sales. One long-held tradition is blaming the weather for poor sales. People don’t really want to shop when it’s raining/snowing, right? It seems like a reasonable excuse – but meteorologists are saying that this excuse doesn’t really hold up, nor will it with the many impacts of climate change that seem to cause more abnormal weather than perhaps we are used to.
The recent Market Watch article, “What meteorologists have to say about retailers’ ‘bad weather’ excuse,” says that retailers just have to get used to strange weather. Instead of using it as an excuse for sales that don’t seem to be as high as they’d like, the advice is to strategize and develop a plan to take advantage. For example, “rolling out the umbrella stand to the front of a store when it’s raining is an old-world example of how retailers have traditionally coped with ‘abnormal’ weather,” – one that could be adopted and expanded to suit the ever-changing whims of Mother Nature.
This is especially true when you factor in how much climate change may come to impact weather in the future. If we continue to use weather as an excuse rather than remedying the situation, more bad weather may just mean a significant drop in overall sales – a drop that may cause more problems than the odd rainy day.
Check out the full article here: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/what-meteorologists-have-to-say-about-retailers-bad-weather-excuse-2016-05-31.
What are your thoughts? Is abnormal weather really that influential that we need to create specific strategies to deal with it, or is it just another run-of-the-mill challenge that isn’t really going anywhere?
No matter the challenge, Marketsupport can help you overcome it (well, rain, sleet, hail and snow excepted). Contact us today at 1-877-421-5081.
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