Weathering Storms for Retail Profits.(Paul Walsh)

Publication: eWeek

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc.

Some of the nation's largest retailers pay Paul Walsh to think about existential-sounding questions like "How cold is cold?" and "How wet is wet?"

No, Walsh isn't a philosopher. Indeed, as a trained scientist (a meteorologist, to be precise), his answers are anything but theoretical. But it certainly is about perception.

The temperature where people start feeling cold--and start acting cold--varies sharply across the United States and certainly globally. And yet until recently, retailers made buying decisions based on fixed--and usually incorrect--assumptions about how consumers react to weather.

"If you live in Seattle--where it rains an awful lot--your behavior on a rainy day is very different than if you lived in sunny L.A.," said Walsh, the senior vice president for client services at Planalytics, in Wayne, Pa.

Another Walsh example is how Americans react to three inches of snow. In some neutral parts of the country, schools are closed and traffic is delayed. In Buffalo,...

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