I always find it funny when the news calls cold weather a ‘snap’. A snap indicated that something is short lived. We’ve had this cold snowy weather for over a fortnight. I don’t think a fortnight in anyone’s book is a snap. But there we are.
After another big dump of snow on Friday evening and Saturday morning, the thaw has set in with milder, sunnier weather replacing it. I think everyone will be glad to see the back of the cold and hope that we get a long and early spring and summer. We have seen a decline in the number of leads generally coming in since the worst of the cold weather set in and a slow down in footfall to the showroom. It’s not for the want of trying. We’ve kept our yard clear of snow, everything has been open and all staff have come in. But when you get prolonged cold like this, it just put’s people off and there’s nothing much that can be done.
We have successfully got through all our fitting OK, so that side of the business has been unaffected. And we met our target quite early in this month so in terms of revenue and sales and are already working on knocking off February, so there should be little or no damage there either. But we may find a little hitch in the middle of the month, stemming from this quieter spell.
But with the cold weather now out of the way, it should help encourage people to get back out there and start spending again. Indeed, even the Government are saying that this extended spell of ice and snow risk the UK slipping into a rare triple-dip recession. We have already seen a contraction of 0.3% in the last quarter 0f 2012. I personally think that they are using the weather as a potential backup excuse if the news is bad in Q1 of this year. I remain confident though that providing February and March supply us with decent calm weather, business will kick back energetically into form.