(Host) It’s not just ski resorts that are suffering from the lack of snow this season. A lot of retailers rely on a good winter to stay afloat, and their season is coming to an end as the pressure mounts to clear winter gear and move in spring products. But, as VPR’s Jane Lindholm reports, having a fire sale may do more harm than good for local merchants.
(Lindholm) "60% off clearance!" "End of season closeout-everything must go!!" Stores and online retailers selling outdoor gear are practically screaming at customers these days-begging us to buy something, anything. Winter clothing and goods just aren’t selling.
At Eastern Mountain Sports, a customer service rep put it this way, quote: "Due to the unusually warm weather this winter, we are sitting on more inventory than we expected to have at this time of the year. From a business standpoint, it would be bad to have thousands of down jackets in stock when it is 70 degrees outside."
(Lindholm) EMS isn’t the only retailer struggling. At Onion River Sports in Montpelier, manager Kip Roberts says this winter has been bad for everyone.
(Roberts) "It’ll take us a bit to recover. Our inventory is miniscule compared to others, be it REI or LL Bean or EMS. So when it’s a bad winter, everybody needs to get rid of some product and then no one makes any money."
(Lindholm) And it really is a bad winter. General retail sales have improved nationwide. But sales of winter goods are down two percent over last December. Ellie Kyung is an expert in consumer behavior and marketing strategy at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.
(Kyung) "The first step in terms of driving consumers towards purchase is this need recognition. The vast majority of people are actually purchasing when the weather actually gets cold so they’re reminded that they actually needed to go out and buy those hats and coats and get the skis and those sorts of things."
(Lindholm) Gear dealers aren’t the only casualties. Stock prices have plunged even for merchants selling sweaters and corduroy pants.
(Kyung) Abercrombie and Fitch went down 12 percent. Anne Taylor went down 8 percent. And the way they’re describing it is because they had a quote-unquote ‘highly promotional environment.’ In order to clear all of these winter items they had to offer some very very serious sales to get them out."
(Lindholm) But Kip Roberts at Onion River Sports says sales don’t always do the trick.
(Roberts) "When there’s no snow, you can put things at 100 percent off. But if there’s no one looking, you’re not going to sell it."
(Mohn) Yes, I would have gotten much more sweaters sooner! Now I just haven’t been really been wearing them so I haven’t been buying more stuff."
(Lindholm) With the sky spitting snow the other day in Burlington, Bianca Mohn popped into Outdoor Gear Exchange in Burlington to buy an extra hat.
"Do you want me to take the tags off for you?"
"That would be great!"
(Lindholm) She’s exactly the kind of shopper OGE owner Marc Sherman is hoping to capitalize on in the next few weeks. And he wants to do it without having to succumb to the price-slashing tactics of the bigger stores.
(Sherman) "We want our customers to feel comfortable shopping with us any time. If you knew that at some point during the year, everything in the store was going to be 50 percent, chances are you wouldn’t buy much when those sales weren’t happening."
(Kyung) "That’s the difficulty with thinking about reference prices."
(Lindholm) Tuck Business School’s Ellie Kyung.
(Kyung) "Once you’ve already conditioned consumers to expect a set of discounts, then even though you might break even this year, next year, even if things are cold, people may be waiting for that discount that may come in the future."
(Lindholm) But with larger chains marking prices way down to shift their products as the season ends, it makes it even more difficult to compete for smaller retail stores that can’t offer those discounts.
But there may be a little bit of hope for local retailers. Some meteorologists are forecasting a colder end to the winter.
(Kyung) "If that were to happen, there may be some benefit to holding on to some of that inventory so that when it actually becomes cold and all these other retailers are actually sold out then you’ll be able to sell that at less of a discount than if you were trying to get rid of everything by February 1st."
(Lindholm) Any cold weather now may come as too little too late though. Onion River Sports in Montpelier was sponsoring a series of winter adventure films at a local theater. But when the snow never arrived they finally had to cancel the showings: people just didn’t want to be reminded of the fun they aren’t having.
For VPR news, I’m Jane Lindholm.
(Host) For more on how the mild winter is affecting everything from ski resorts to plants and birds, tune in to Vermont Edition today.