Malls take heavy hit from winter blast
By: Elizabeth Harness
Updated: December 17, 2007
The winter blast really took a bite out of shopping at local malls, right at the height of holiday shopping season.The parking lot was full, the bell ringers were out, and shoppers were busy inside Eastview Mall wrapping up their holiday shopping. "We were feeling cooped up at home with all the snow and we don't live too far away so we decided to venture out," says shopper Becky Shapely. Devyn Brennan also went shopping saying, "We just don't have school today so we decided to go on our free day." Typically, the second Saturday and Sunday before Christmas are among the top five busiest shopping days of the year. But, the weekend was cut in half from the snow storm and as a result shopping sales slumped. "We took a pretty good hit yesterday. We only did about 20 to 25-percent in business as compared to what we would normally do," says Eastview Mall Manager Mike Kauffman. Even though Friday and Saturday did great business in advance of the storm, Sunday's lack of retail dollars was a big enough hit to pack a financial punch. "It was a pretty significant drop in business yesterday," says Kauffman.
Now while the snow day is expected to keep a steady stream of customers coming into Eastview Mall today it's actually the reast of the week that managers are counting on to make up for the loss in the snowstorm. "We would expect over the course of the next two to three days. We certainly make up a lot of those dollars if not all of those dollars that we lost on Sunday," says Kauffman. That's because there's only eight days until Christmas, and there are still shoppers who are just starting to make their lists.
