Comparing the impact of winter storms on certain types of local businesses.

Winter storms can be extremely disruptive events, trapping people in their homes for days, even long after the storm has subsided.

While major winter storms don’t typically bring the kind of catastrophic structural damage to businesses as some of the other weather events in our study, that doesn’t mean they don’t result in major financial losses for local businesses.

We’ll start with a combined view of all the winter storms in our analysis first, then we’ll show how winter storms in each of the states we analyzed differed to see whether some winter storms were far more damaging to local businesses than others.

How many businesses permanently closed due to winter storms?

You can imagine that during the height of a major winter storm, many small businesses are forced to temporarily close their doors. Not all businesses are able to re-open after the storm has subsided, however.

In order to determine how many businesses were permanently closed due to the winter storms in our analysis, we identified business that stopped transacting and then didn’t process another transaction within 90 days after the event.

Our analysis found that overall, about 5% of local businesses permanently shut down during or shortly after a major winter storm.

Food and beverage shops were the most heavily affected, with about 8% permanently closing. Restaurants were the second most impacted type of business, with nearly 7% closing.

How much was average revenue at local businesses impacted during winter storms in different states?

As we saw in the section above, winter storms can cause enough financial or physical damage to outright kill a local business. In this section, we’ll examine those businesses that were able to remain open and transacting and see how revenue was impacted during each of the winter storms in our analysis.

Our analysis identified when, after the beginning of an individual winter storm, average revenue at open businesses deviated from what was otherwise expected.

The table below shows how much revenue was impacted (negatively or positively) on average throughout the affected period.

An important note: these figures represent average revenue at businesses that were able to remain open and transacting.

More details by industry type

Select an industry in the table below to see more details on the impact of different winter storms on that industry:

Timeline: how long did it take for local business revenue to return to normal after each winter storm?

Now, let’s take a closer look at how much revenue was impacted during each winter storm in our analysis, and how long it took for revenue to get back to “normal.”