Water is wet. Sky is blue. Spring follows Winter. All things we hold as true and yet, it appears the last of these has managed to foil the best laid plans of Dick's Sporting Goods amid their dismal earnings call. The company at once blamed 'warmer weather' than expected for shrinkage in its outerwear sales and because "it didn't look like Winter was going to come," the firm then blamed excessively cold weather and its lack of outerwear inventory to meet those needs. Just as the firm said, "we're not as smart as we look," as it appears that unless we get Goldilocks perfection year-round, retail sales are all but a pure guess on meteorological mysticism.
From Dicks' Sporting Goods Earnings Call...
Dicks: ...Higher than anticipated sales in hunting were more than offset by significantly lower expected sales in outerwear and cold weather accessories as we experienced warmer weather relative to this year versus last year during peak selling periods...
Dicks: ...the warm weather again this year, we significantly reduced receipts of our partnership orders in winter outerwear and related accessories...
Dicks: ...Although as we finally received cold weather along with snow in January, it had a negative effect on our store sales performance for the back end of Q4 and into Q1.
Dicks: ...It didn't look like winter was going to come again and then when we did get some of the colder weather, we didn't have enough inventory to really support those sales
Analyst: ...I guess the first question is a tough one but retailers have been dealing with weather problems for as long as they've been around but is there any new technology that you think will help this type of problem?
Dicks: ...Based on the temperature, we can pretty much predict on a day-by-day basis what our business is going to do. The issue is we can't influence the temperature.
Dicks: ...I've said this a hundred times when it's been cold and we've had a lot of snow, I've indicated to the Street, hey! we're not as smart as we look, the weather was helpful to our business and when the weather isn't helpful to our business we're not as dumb as we look but what we can do to change how to predict the weather and how sales are going to be based on the weather, I don't see anything different next year than this year and I don't see anything different five years from now than this year.