Winter Storms Bookended the Holiday Season — and Retail Earnings Felt It
What Winter Storms Bellamy and Ezra mean for TGT, KSS, BBY, and regional exposure risk
According to RetailNext, U.S. in-store foot traffic declined 5.8% year over year over Black Friday weekend, a data point that initially fit a familiar holiday narrative: cautious consumers, stretched budgets, and a softer retail environment.
But viewed across the entire holiday shopping period — from Black Friday through Super Saturday — that headline masks a more important force shaping results.
Weather repeatedly interfered with access at the most critical moments.
The most important number from Black Friday wasn’t the national average. It was this: Saturday traffic in the Midwest collapsed by 41.8%, driven almost entirely by severe winter weather tied to Winter Storm Bellamy.
That single regional shock was large enough to drag down the national figure materially.
This wasn’t a demand problem. It was an access problem.
RetailNext, Black Friday, and the Weather Signal
Looking back, the RetailNext Black Friday Weekend data reads less like a post-holiday scorecard and more like early confirmation of the weather signal that defined the 2025 holiday season.
The Midwest wasn’t alone. Unseasonably mild temperatures across the South reduced urgency for winter seasonal categories, dampening demand for cold-weather apparel and related discretionary purchases.
At the same time, the highly populated West Coast was repeatedly hit by heavy rain events — atmospheric rivers and Pineapple Express systems — that suppressed in-store foot traffic in major coastal metros.
The result was a holiday period shaped not by collapsing consumer intent, but by weather acting as a broad, uneven headwind across much of the country.
Spending behavior reinforces that distinction. Shoppers who did make it to stores spent more:
Average Transaction Value +2.1%
Average Unit Retail +4.4%
Units per transaction declined
In other words, demand held — access and urgency didn’t.
Black Friday wasn’t the start of a weak season. It was the start of a pattern: weather redistributing when and where revenue showed up, rather than eliminating it outright.
Who Was Doing the Spending?
One nuance in the RetailNext data deserves attention: who drove the higher spend metrics.
The rise in Average Transaction Value and Average Unit Retail raises an unresolved question: was this strength concentrated in the upper end of the consumer spectrum?
In other words, did Black Friday increasingly reflect the behavior of the upper portion of the K-shaped consumer, where higher-income shoppers remained active and decisive even as overall traffic softened?
It also warrants caution.
Some portion of the higher spending almost certainly reflects price effects rather than volume effects, as inflation continues to lift ticket prices even when unit counts fall. Units per transaction declined, suggesting shoppers weren’t buying more — they were buying fewer, higher-priced items.
The point isn’t to resolve that debate here, but to recognize that headline spending metrics can conceal very different underlying behaviors — and that weather, income stratification, and inflation are now interacting in ways that make simple “strong versus weak consumer” narratives increasingly unreliable.
The Bellamy Exposure: Why the Midwest Shock Mattered
The reason Winter Storm Bellamy distorted national Black Friday traffic wasn’t just intensity — it was where it hit.
The Midwest remains one of the most store-dense, traffic-sensitive, and habit-driven retail regions in the country. When Saturday traffic collapsed by 41.8%, the impact didn’t stay local. It landed squarely on retailers with outsized regional exposure and limited geographic buffer.
A collapse of that magnitude in a commercially dense region doesn’t just influence the national average — it overwhelms it.
That’s why the 5.8% national decline is misleading on its own.
A Second Hit: The Boxing Day “Bomb Cyclone”
Black Friday wasn’t the only peak execution window affected.
Weather Storm Ezra chose a particularly inconvenient moment to detonate — the post-Christmas, Boxing Day weekend and the interregnum between Christmas and New Year’s, when retailers rely on returns, exchanges, gift-card redemption, and clean execution to close the quarter.
National Weather Service Issues ‘Stay Inside’ Warning as 36 Inches of Snow Approach
With hurricane-force gusts, whiteout conditions, and widespread travel disruption across the Upper Midwest, Great Lakes, and Northeast, Ezra did exactly what weather bombs tend to do: drive foot traffic toward zero while turning staffing, logistics, and inventory flow into a real-time logic puzzle.
This matters because Super Saturday is not impulse-driven. It is typically dominated by:
Returns and exchanges
Apparel and footwear sizing fixes
Gift-card redemption
Post-holiday essentials and replenishment
In other words, high-intent, high-conversion trips.
When a storm like Ezra hits during this window, shoppers don’t browse less — they don’t go at all. Based on prior disruptions like Winter Storm Bellamy, a reasonable expectation for Ezra’s impact is:
Upper Midwest / Great Lakes: 25–40% same-day traffic declines in storm-impacted metros
Northeast urban corridors: 10–20% declines, driven by ice, travel friction, and safety concerns
Sunbelt: Minimal storm disruption, but continued warmth suppresses seasonal urgency, limiting any offsetting gains
This is not lost demand. It is deferred, displaced, or diluted demand, with a meaningful portion — primarily discretionary and impulse categories — that never recover.
The Takeaway
When weather disrupts both the start and the close of the holiday shopping period, it stops being noise and starts showing up in Q4 earnings.
Yes, total spending metrics may still look resilient — but the quality of that spending matters. Some of the lift reflects inflation pushing ticket sizes higher, not broader volume, and some appears increasingly driven by the upper end of the K-shaped consumer, not the mass market.
At the same time, weather-driven access constraints during the post-Christmas window limit returns, exchanges, and gift-card redemption — the mechanisms retailers rely on to convert holiday demand into realized revenue.
The result is a quarter where topline numbers can look acceptable, even as traffic, conversion, and margin tell a more fragile story underneath.
A weak consumer may not ultimately define the 2025 holiday season — but by headline strength propped up by the top end of the income spectrum, while the majority of households quietly cut back on units, buying one Barbie instead of two, or, importantly, one sweater instead of a complete refresh.
Musical Coda
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