Mom and Pop shops rely on your foot traffic to keep sales steady throughout the year. Storms can force people to hunker down at home. That can force you to put a hold on crossing off people on your holiday shopping list. Small retails may have limited alternatives for online shopping, so they depend on in-store visits for business.
In the midst of the holiday shopping season in downtown York, Christina Clarke is busy stirring up soap. She says, “We were a little worried with the big blizzard, but Mother Nature held and we got a full day of business in.”
Clarke’s the owner of Sunrise Soap Co. She says the recent snow storms impacted her sales for one day. She says, “We’re open for 8 hours. On Tuesday, it was slow. The kids had off school and everybody stayed hunkered down.”
With a late Thanksgiving and Christmas a week and a half away, Clarke needs the weather to cooperate. She says, “So people are not scared to go out, so they can come out and bang through their Christmas list.”
Max Reiss and his daughter own The Watchmaker’s Daughter. He says time is winding down on the holiday shopping season. “If it’s snowing, they get concerned about parking and the slipperiness, walking on the pavement and streets and people decide well they aren’t going shopping today.”
Loyal customers have shopped at the jewelry store for 68 years. Reiss says he credits sales to his personal approach. He says, “It’s a hands on thing. You order online, you can’t see the product until it arrives and locally you can look and handle the things you’re looking at.”
In comparison to major chain stores, a National Retail Federation spokesperson says they don’t measure weather on the impact of retails sales. She says retailers are on track to reach a 3.9% growth in sales this year.