Last week, I wrote that Gap had nowhere to hide in Q1. The warmest spring in more than 130 years couldn’t save Old Navy’s dress business.

Macy’s told a different story this morning — comparable sales up 3%, the strongest first quarter performance in four years, with dresses as a standout category in the same weather window that Old Navy couldn’t convert.

That contrast tells you something important: the weather was the same for everyone. What differed was execution, assortment, and, importantly, who walked through the door.

Macy’s customer base skews middle- to upper-income. That customer is less exposed to fuel cost pressures and the collapse in sentiment that is hitting lower-income households. With the S&P 500 near record highs and wealth effects still positive for higher-income consumers, Macy’s has a structural advantage that Old Navy and Walmart don’t.

The K-shaped economy is showing up in the earnings results in real time.

One caveat worth naming: the warm spring that helped drive Q1 traffic and dress sales at Macy’s is not going to repeat in Q2 at the same intensity. Weather is less of a macro driver for Macy’s than for a mass-market value retailer — but it is not irrelevant. And the invisible tailwind that lifted Q1 results across the board is gone.

Spring raised guidance and said Q2 trends are continuing. The World Cup, Fourth of July fireworks, and MLB partnerships give Macy's event-driven demand catalysts that substitute for weather-driven demand. They'll need them — storm clouds are gathering on multiple fronts.

But the weather was in the room on this earnings call, too. Nobody introduced it.

© 2026 G2 Weather Intelligence. All rights reserved.

“It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall” —Bob Dylan

CNBC’s retail roundup this week called Q1 “surprisingly robust” and correctly identified three tailwinds that buoyed results — tax refunds, buy now pay later, and consumer resilience.

What it missed? The weather.

February through April 2026 was one of the warmest springs in more than 130 years. The national temperature ran more than 5 degrees above normal for the entire window.

That is not background noise. That is a demand driver — and it appears nowhere in the analyst quotes, or the earnings call commentary from the companies that benefited most.

The asymmetry is always consistent. Weather gets named when it hurts. When it helps, it becomes execution, strategy, and consumer resilience.

The Three Tailwinds That Carried Q1

Tax refunds confirmed by Target, Burlington, Ross, and Walmart. Higher-than-normal refunds arrived at exactly the right moment to offset fuel cost pressure. Buy now, pay later adoption hit new highs across all income cohorts. Consumers were stretching further than the headline results suggested.

And then there was the weather — the silent partner nobody named.

The warmest spring in 130 years pulled forward demand, multiplied shopping occasions, and moved seasonal inventory at full price across every major retail footprint simultaneously.

All three are gone.

The Q2 Weather Signal — A Subtle But Important Distinction

Spring and summer move consumer demand differently. In spring, a single warm weekend moves the needle. Summer requires more persistent anomalies sustained over weeks, not days.

There is a second factor worth naming: climate change acclimation.

Summer demand is less sensitive to modest temperature anomalies from normal than spring demand. Consumers are already in summer mode — a degree or two above normal doesn’t change behavior the way a warm April weekend does. What moves the needle in summer is an outlier sustained over weeks, not days.

Last June and July were exactly that.

The heat dome pushed Boston to 102 degrees and put 160 million Americans under heat alerts. At Lowe’s, June comps edged up 0.3% before July surged 4.7% as outdoor, lawn, and cooling categories caught up simultaneously.

Management said it plainly: ‘Our performance clearly improved as the weather turned more favorable in June and July.’ They referenced the weather 15 times on the call.

June 2026 shows a modest warm lean in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic — but nothing approaching last June's historic heat. The Central Plains and South sit in Equal Chances. Warm but wet in the Southeast. The threshold that was cleared decisively last June and July is not in the current forecast.

What the Maps Actually Show

June 2025: Every region above normal. Northeast 123rd warmest out of 131 years. No cold pocket anywhere in the continental US.

June 2026: Above normal in the West with a strong signal — consistent with last year, no year-on-year upside. The Northeast and Mid-Atlantic show a modest warm lean, but nothing approaching last June’s historic heat. Equal Chances across the Central Plains and South. Warm and wet in the Southeast. A below-normal temperature signal is emerging in the Central Plains and South in weeks 3-4.

The Northeast warm lean is real but modest. Leaning warm against a near-record baseline is not a tailwind. It is a smaller headwind than Equal Chances would be, but it’s not a signal that drives significant incremental demand.

The Category Risk

The single biggest weather-driven demand risk in Q2 is the cooling category. Not because June 2026 is forecast to be cold — it isn’t. But because air conditioners, fans, and portable cooling units rode one of the strongest heat signals in a generation last June. June 2026 sits in Equal Chances in the Northeast. A category that surged on last June’s historic heat is now measuring that performance against a normal year.

AutoZone named it directly on their earnings call last week. Comps decelerated to 1.3% in the final two weeks of their quarter. They are planning for a normal, if not hotter-than-normal, summer.

It’s a bad bet.

Outdoor living, patio, lawn and garden, and seasonal apparel face the same comparison problem — not because June will be cold, but because the second half of last June was historically hot, and this June (and July) offer no comparable signal.

The Macro Overlay

The CNBC piece confirms what earnings calls have been signaling all week. Walmart, Ross, and TJX guided conservatively on Q2 — not because their businesses are broken but because they (wisely) can see the tax refund tailwind fading and fuel cost pressure building. They’re also pretty weather-savvy, but that goes unmentioned (see above).

While retailers can at times be “more cautious in their guidance than the reality might suggest,” executives and analysts generally agree they could see a more strained consumer in the current quarter and the rest of the year, said Saunders.

″[That] tells you that retailers are kind of seeing the signs that some of this trough around the growth rate won’t persist across the balance of this year,” said Saunders. “Not that it will be terrible, but just the heat will come out of some of that momentum, and I think that is related to the fading impact of tax [refunds] and the picture of inflation that will probably pick up across the balance of this year.”

—Source: CNBC

Walmart’s CFO said it directly: higher tax refunds muted the fuel cost pressure in Q1. As those refunds fade, consumers will feel more of that pressure.

Layer the weather comparison on top, and the Q2 picture comes into focus.

The tailwinds that carried Q1 have all reversed or run out of steam. What replaced them is a consumer under historic financial pressure, a June weather setup that offers no national heat consensus, and a year-over-year comparison that is among the most challenging in recent memory for weather-sensitive categories.

No Backstop in Q2

CNBC called Q1 surprisingly robust. It was. Tax refunds, buy-now, pay-later, and a record-warm spring carried retailers further than the underlying consumer fundamentals suggested was possible.

Two of those three were named on virtually every earnings call. The third — the warmest spring in more than 130 years — was the silent partner nobody acknowledged.

Q2 has no equivalent tailwinds. The weather was the silent partner in Q1. In Q2, it becomes a headwind — not because summer will be cold, but because last summer was one of the hottest on record, and this summer offers nothing to match it.

The companies that guided conservatively — Walmart, Ross, TJX — are reading the signals correctly.

The weather was the backstop in Q1. There is no backstop in Q2.

Musical Coda

© 2026 G2 Weather Intelligence. All rights reserved.

Last November, I warned that Gap was right for the wrong reasons — that great weather, not execution, was supporting their results, and that they would be blindsided when conditions reversed.

What happened next made the story worse than I anticipated.

The weather didn’t reverse in Q1 2026. It got better. February through April delivered one of the warmest springs in more than 130 years. Multiple regions ranked among the warmest on record. The national temperature ran more than 5 degrees above normal for the entire window.

For Gap, and Old Navy in particular, that’s not a subtle tailwind.

It’s the closest thing to a guaranteed demand environment that a mass-market seasonal apparel retailer can get. When temperatures run 5 degrees above normal for an entire quarter, consumers transition out of the winter mindset earlier, warm weekends multiply shopping occasions, and seasonal inventory moves at full price.

Dresses, swim, and shorts — Old Navy’s core seasonal categories — should have been flying off the racks. They weren’t.

Gap’s stock fell 17% today, erasing approximately $1.6 billion in market cap. Turns out the emperor had no clothes (denim or otherwise) — and the warmest spring in more than 130 years made sure everyone could see it.

CEO Richard Dickson was direct on the call: “Bluntly, we have not had the right fashion and value equation for that category.”

He’s correct. The warmest spring in more than 130 years could not move Old Navy’s seasonal assortment. The tailwind was there. The product wasn’t.

Consider Kohl’s, serving the same customer in the same weather window. Spring seasonal up mid-teens. Same weather. Right product. Right place.

The weather removed the most convenient external excuse. What remained was entirely internal — the wrong fashion, the wrong price, the wrong value equation.

The more uncomfortable question is whether Gap has been misreading its own results for two consecutive quarters — attributing to execution what the weather was quietly delivering, and walking into Q1 with misplaced confidence.

The warmest spring in more than 130 years stripped away the last layer of cover. The forest — an assortment problem that had been there all along — became impossible to ignore.

In November, I warned that Gap would be blindsided when the weather reversed. The weather cooperated in Q1. That turned out to be the harder problem.

© 2026 G2 Weather Intelligence. All rights reserved.

I don’t normally publish two days in a row. But AutoZone’s earnings miss landed squarely in my wheelhouse, my latest podcast dropped today with eerily good timing, and it’s raining again — so my plan to mow the front yard and back forty will have to wait.

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I saw it coming — just not all of it.

As the holiday week came into range, the short-range forecasts told a clear story here in the mid-Atlantic: Memorial Day week was a tale of two seasons.

We eat our own cooking at G2 Weather Intelligence, so we acted on the signal. Packed up and headed to our cottage at the Delaware shore for the heat wave window, then returned to headquarters in the western Philadelphia suburbs ahead of the deterioration.

At the beach, my wife took my photo. Neither of us noticed the black bird flying overhead until we looked at the image later. I took it as an omen.

It was …

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"The further back you can look, the further forward you are likely to see." — Sir Winston Churchill

Lately, I find myself with more time on my hands than I've had in over thirty years — and I absolutely love it. Doing my own thing while being accountable to no one (outside of my own house, of course) is the best job I've ever had — and I've had some good ones.

And it’s given me the time to read more history than I have in decades. Lately, I’ve been absorbed by Timothy Egan’s account of the Dust Bowl and Andrew Ross Sorkin’s reconstruction of the 1929 crash.

They both cover the same general era — two different catastrophes, one environmental and one financial — and yet if you blur your eyes, the patterns are remarkably similar. Warning signs that were visible and ignored. Systems that worked brilliantly until they didn’t. Decision-makers who planned for the continuation of what they already knew rather than the probability of what was actually coming.

The farmers of the High Plains kept pl…

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Three major retailers — Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Target — reported earnings this week. All three beat expectations, navigating a choppy quarter marked by shifting weather patterns, persistent DIY softness, and a macro environment that kept demand for large projects under pressure.

But across the two home center calls, the most significant demand variable — weather — still doesn’t have a systematic home in how these companies communicate forward guidance to investors.

Lowe’s CFO Brandon Sink settled the debate when JPMorgan’s Christopher Horvers pressed him on whether tax refunds were the primary Q1 lift.

Sink was direct: “We looked at Q1, the tax refund impact was more limited on our business. More significant dri…

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My wife and I — and Benji, too — are decamping tomorrow for our summer cottage near Bethany Beach.

Three reasons: the forecast for our PA HQ in the western suburbs of Philadelphia is calling for mid-90s through Wednesday; we want to get ahead of the Memorial Day weekend crowds; and we’re fortunate enough to be able to dodge the suburban heatwave, fill the gas tank, and head south before what may turn out to be a “premature elaboration” of summer.

And elaborate it will — at least for now.

The New York Post is calling it a “triple-digit burn.” The National Weather Service says “heat will be making headlines for much of the Eastern US for the first half of the week.” USA TODAY is calling it “sudden summer.”

They’re all right. After a cool start to May — two weeks of …

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Nobody is talking about the weather.

They should be.

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"The animal spirits in the Northeast have been on a tight leash all spring. The week of Memorial Day cuts it."

A week ago, I described the Northeast Memorial Day setup as a coiled spring of consumer demand — it’s still true, and the tension is building.

It reminded me of that time last fall when Benji spotted an unsuspecting cat during our morning walk. I got it on video. (Of course I did.)

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“In the next year or two, the enterprise world will sort into two camps: companies where AI runs their business, and companies where AI is still a project,” —IBM CEO Arvind Krishna

The commercial weather industry has an emerging business model problem opportunity.

For years, it's sold data subscriptions to passive business users. A firehose of weather data — temperature feeds, precipitation APIs, and dashboards few read. Most of it unnecessary — all of it a cost masquerading as a competitive advantage.

The assumption baked into every product is that the customer receives the data, interprets it, and decides what to do with it. That assumption is being dismantled. Not gradually — suddenly.

Two forces are converging simultaneously.

First: AI-driven weather modeling is rapidly becoming comparable to traditional forecasting models — and can be run faster and at a fraction of the cost. The barrier to accessing high-quality, location-level forecast data is collapsing.

Second: Agentic AI can now…

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Pent-up demand released into a warm, dry Memorial Day window is not a gentle recovery — it's a surge.

Every year around this time, our wisteria explodes. Purple cascades so thick you can’t see the pergola underneath. This year, a late April freeze killed the blooms before they had a chance. Bare wood where there should be flowers.

If you didn’t know better, you’d write the same obituary for spring retail. Tariff anxiety. Consumer confidence wobbling. War in Iran driving gas prices through the roof. The narrative practically writes itself: spring 2026 is impaired, seasonal categories are exposed, and the smart money is sitting on the sidelines.

The weather forecast says otherwise.

Last Memorial Day Wasn’t a Consumer Story. It Was a Weather Story.

On May 22, 2025, a rare late-season nor’easter swept up the East Coast. Temperatures dropped 20 degrees below normal across the Northeast. Over 34,000 customers lost power. Mountain snow retu…

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One of my favorite Amazon TV shows is Clarkson’s Farm, starring the eponymous — and at times controversial — Jeremy Clarkson. He and I are roughly the same age. He’s funnier and considerably wealthier. But I’m (way!) more fit — and I’d beat him in a foot race 11 times out of 10.

In nearly every episode, Jeremy announces he’s had a brainstorm. It usually leads to something brilliant, expensive, and ultimately disastrous. A restaurant. A bee farm. A combine harvester he can’t operate.

That’s something we have in common. I have brainstorms, too. Mine happen on the elliptical or out on a run (as noted, I’m way more fit). Ninety percent of the time, post-endorphin high, they end up “in the bin.”

This morning I had another one.

Welcome to my Friday Brainstorm. Occasional. Subscriber-only. Topical or completely off the rails — depending on the morning.

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Snowflake published a blog post last week on what they call weather intelligence. It caught my eye (needless to say) — and I have thoughts.

They give the following good examples: Cargill uses weather data to reroute ships and cut emissions. The Met Office helps hospitals anticipate ambulance demand. The examples are real. The value is real.

But the post leaves out the hard part.

Data Is Not a Strategy

For every Cargill, there are many retailers, CPG brands, restaurant operators, and health systems paying — in some cases, dearly — for weather data … and not getting a meaningful payback.

Weather data vendors, by and large, deliver the map. The decision is left to you. That gap — between raw weather data and systemic business action — is where many organizations sit today.

Sure, Snowflake can efficiently deliver boatloads of weather data. But it doesn’t get you a strategy. It doesn’t (directly) get you…

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Benji and I took our morning walk yesterday (Sunday), like we do most days. I call it his morning constipational.

It was cloudy, raw, and still damp from yesterday’s much-needed rain — the kind of morning when Benji takes his time finding the perfect spot, then circles clockwise — anticyclonic, for you weather nerds — several times more than usual before sticking the landing and celebrating with his (extended) end zone dance.

Standing there in the cold, I thought about the Home Depot and Lowe’s five miles from my house. This is their season. Every raw, cold weekend morning like this one is a delayed sale — a consumer who stayed inside, skipped the nursery run, pushed the weekend project to next weekend.

The weather’s impact on consumers is like politics — all lo…

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There I was …

October 29, 2012. Superstorm Sandy is making landfall on the Jersey Shore. On a beeline (it seemed), for the CNBC headquarters in Englewood Cliffs. I was live on Squawk Box with Mike Santoli, reporting on the storm’s impact on retailers and the broader consumer economy as it was happening.

The Weather Channel and CNBC were sister companies at the time. When a storm of Sandy's magnitude was tracking toward New York City, you forward-deployed to the studio, and you stayed there. In New Jersey, they call it going to the mattresses. The photo at the bottom of this post is proof.

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Years ago, my oldest son, Michael, had a decision to make. He'd worked hard, applied to some of the best schools in the country, and found himself with acceptances from two of them — NYU and the University of Michigan. Two great universities. Two very different campus visits. And as it turned out, two very different days of weather.

The NYU visit was mostly indoors. The weather in New York that day was grey and unremarkable — the kind of city day that keeps you moving from lobby to lobby without ever really feeling the place. He was impressed. He wasn’t moved.

Next, we drove to Ann Arbor to visit Michigan. It was St. Paddy’s Day. One of those early spring afternoons that arrives like a surprise — warm, sunny, and about fifteen degrees warmer than it had any right to be. We walked the campus in shirtsl…

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“The consumer who walks into Home Depot or Lowe’s in May 2026 has a lawn that needs attention and less disposable income than a year ago. That tension — weather-driven need versus macro-constrained budget — is the defining dynamic of spring 2026.”

I’m writing this from the G2 Intelligence southern HQ at the Delaware shore. It’s April 16th. The forecast high today is 90 degrees. And I’m getting a new HVAC system installed — replacing a unit that picked the wrong spring to give up. Murphy never fails to bite me in the ass.

But this is not just a weather anecdote. It’s a demand signal. A hot and sweaty one.

April 16th. Ninety degrees. A contractor in my driveway, a technician in the crawl space, and a purchase order somewhere in the supply chain. This is what pull-forward demand looks like in practice. The record warmth that began in March hasn’t let up. Spring demand didn’t arrive in May this year. It arrived in March, six weeks early, and it hasn’t left.

NOAA released the official May 20…

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Weather doesn't sneak up on you. It signals you — weeks and months in advance.

Most retailers still treat weather as something that happens to them. A bad quarter explained away on an earnings call. A miss attributed to an unseasonably warm October or a late spring. The forecast was wrong. The weather was unusual. Nothing to see here.

That’s not a weather problem; it’s a management problem opportunity.

Agentic AI and high-resolution modeling have made it possible to turn weather signals into a demand planning advantage — weeks before they show up in the register.

The technology exists. The margin opportunity is real. Most of the industry hasn’t yet moved in an integrated, enterprise-wide way.

That window won’t stay open long.

I sat down with Troy Siwek, General Manager of GreyOrange, on the In Store podcast to talk about what changes when retailers stop reacting to weather and start using it.

—Paul

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