The Impact of Weather on Retail Sales
Brigitte Roth Tran uses daily sales at more than 100 stores of one national apparel and sporting goods brand, April 2010 to December 2013, matched to weather station data. Good-weather gains were offset by lower sales in the following weeks and were no longer statistically significant by four weeks, while bad-weather losses persisted. Online sales and shoppers moving between indoor and outdoor centres offset little of the store losses, and stores with more experience of a kind of weather lost less to it.
Brigitte Roth Tran uses daily sales at more than 100 stores of one national apparel and sporting goods brand, April 2010 to December 2013, matched to weather station data. Good-weather gains were offset by lower sales in the following weeks and were no longer statistically significant by four weeks, while bad-weather losses persisted. Online sales and shoppers moving between indoor and outdoor centres offset little of the store losses, and stores with more experience of a kind of weather lost less to it.
Written from the letter read in full 2026-10-21.
What our sources record
Recorded when this source was checked, figures included, with page references and quotation marks removed.
FRBSF Economic Letter 2022-23, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, 22 August 2022.