Same Weather. Same Sector. Opposite Outcomes.
What Q3 Revealed About Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Weather-Driven Retail
G2 Weather Intelligence™ — Retail Earnings Weather Read
In a downturn, weather isn’t an excuse. It’s an advantage. Operators who win treat it that way.
Home Depot and Lowe’s just delivered two very different versions of the same quarter.
Both faced the same setup: a housing market with no pulse, a cautious consumer, sluggish big-ticket demand, and—most importantly—a near-complete absence of the hurricane activity that boosted last year’s Q3.
Yet the outcomes couldn’t have been more different.
Home Depot missed expectations, cut guidance, and opened the day down sharply.
Lowe’s posted an EPS beat, absorbed the same headwind, and opened the day meaningfully higher.
Same macro. Same consumer. Same weather. Very different results.
That’s the story.
What Weather Actually Did
Both companies took a quantifiable hit from the missing hurricanes.
Home Depot: ~0.8 pts of comp drag → roughly $330M in lost storm-related sales
Lowe’s: ~1.0 pt of comp drag → roughly $200M in lost storm-related sales
EPS impact for both: a few cents per share — real, but not thesis-changing
Despite similar weather headwinds:
HD turned the drag into a miss.
LOW turned it into a beat.
This is the part most analysts miss: weather didn’t drive the spread — execution did.
Home Depot: Exposed by the Absence of Storms
HD’s Q3 message leaned heavily on the missing hurricanes.
But what the numbers suggest is broader:
Storm-sensitive categories underperformed (roofing, generators, exterior repair)
Big-ticket remained weak
Project backlogs thinned
Mix worked against them
Guidance moved lower
And the market responded: HD opened down ~5%, wiping out roughly $18B in value
When your model leans heavily on storm-driven demand, a quiet season hurts more than it should.
Lowe’s: Same Headwind, Different Outcome
Lowe’s took the same weather hit — arguably larger on a percentage basis — and still delivered an earnings beat.
Why?
Cleaner inventory
More balanced mix
Stronger Pro contribution
Tighter cost discipline
More resilient project demand
And management that quantified the weather drag instead of hiding behind it
LOW opened the day up more than 3%, adding roughly $4B in market value before noon.
Same storm lap. Opposite results.
The Structural Difference: Systems vs. Storylines
The clearest contrast between the two calls wasn’t just in the numbers — it was in how each company explained them.
Home Depot led with weather.
In both the press release and on the call, CEO Ted Decker said their results “missed our expectations primarily due to the lack of storms in the third quarter,” and then layered in consumer uncertainty and housing pressure as additional headwinds.
Lowe’s acknowledged the same issue — and even quantified roughly a 100 bps storm drag — but then shifted the emphasis to how they’re running the business.
That included early work on what the CEO called “agentic commerce”: building more adaptive decision systems to respond to real-time signals across demand, inventory, Pro activity, and operations.
They didn’t tie that language directly to weather. They didn’t have to.
Once your operating model can see what’s happening across the business in near real time, weather becomes one signal among many — something you plan around and act on, not the headline for why a quarter came in light.
That’s the structural difference: one narrative anchored in external conditions, the other anchored in how the system responds to them.
Why This Matters Now
Q4 tells a different weather story for home centers. Much of the seasonal lift depends on when winter truly arrives, and for this sector, the impacts can be counterintuitive.
Early cold snaps, snow, and the first Arctic fronts are usually tailwinds, pulling forward demand for heating, insulation, and weather-prep.
Warm, dry stretches can also help, keeping outdoor projects alive deeper into the season.
Only the most severe events tend to suppress traffic meaningfully.
The most significant weather impact on home improvement sales comes later — in late Q1 and early Q2, when spring resets and outdoor projects drive the year.
But this year, early winter conditions could give both HD and LOW an earlier bump in winter-need categories.
A Quick Look Ahead: Early December Arctic Cold
Early December is now showing signs of a meaningful Arctic blast, and that matters for home centers.
When winter turns on quickly, the category mix shifts almost immediately.
Heating, insulation, and weather-prep products typically accelerate
Trips become more mission-driven
Seasonal sets see cleaner, faster sell-through
Pro demand often holds steady where temperatures stay workable
When an early-season cold snap hits, people buy winter products sooner than they normally would. That boosts sales now, but some of those sales would have happened later in the season anyway. So not all of it is “new” demand — part of it is simply moved up on the calendar.
The differentiator is speed. A 20–30 degree temperature drop changes behavior overnight. Retailers that adjust inventory, labor, and local promotion in real time will capture the surge. Those waiting for the weekly sales readout will miss it — again.
I’ll break down the full cold-weather outlook in Friday’s G2 post, and next week I’ll shift to mass and specialty, where cold weather creates an entirely different demand profile.
The Bottom Line
Home Depot and Lowe’s faced the same macro environment, the same consumer, and the same missing storms.
Lowe’s beat. Home Depot missed. One added billions in value. One lost billions.
The weather didn’t cause the gap. It revealed it.