Does weather move the high street? What rain really does to footfall
Rain is the oldest excuse in retail. It is also, within limits, a legitimate one, but only if you can measure the effect precisely enough to separate weather from everything else.
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The wet-weekend excuse is as old as retail itself: sales were down because it rained, footfall was off because of the storm, nobody came because of the cold. These explanations are used so often, and so conveniently, that managers who hear them twice a month tend to stop believing them. The problem is that they are sometimes entirely true, and without measurement there is no way to tell.
What rain actually does to the high street
The effect of precipitation on open high streets is real and documented. Shoppers who would otherwise browse a town centre make a straightforward calculation: staying dry is more comfortable than going out. The more exposed the retail environment (open streets, open-air markets, uncovered car parks), the stronger the effect.
Footfall data from severe weather events shows how sharp the effect can be.
According to UK footfall data reported by Retail Gazette, Storm Ciara caused a 15.3% drop in footfall across UK retail during its peak weekend in February 2020.
Storm Dennis, the following weekend, pushed that further to a 16.3% decline. The month as a whole, the wettest February on record in the UK according to the Met Office, saw high-street footfall fall 7.8%, according to data reported by Retail Gazette, with storms and sustained rainfall as the primary weather-related driver.
A 15% footfall drop over a weekend is the equivalent of losing most of Saturday’s trading, and for businesses with high fixed costs the revenue impact is severe.
The covered-destination switch
Not all the footfall that leaves the high street during rain is lost to retail; a proportion of it relocates. Covered shopping centres and retail parks, where visitors can park undercover or move between stores without going outside, can see a partly compensating effect during wet periods.
In February 2020, while high-street footfall fell 7.8%, shopping centres fell 2.5% and retail parks just 1.1%. US research on retail sales points the same way: rain shifts some sales from outdoor to indoor shopping centres.
The implication for city centre operators and planners is that rain partly redistributes retail demand rather than simply destroying it. That redistribution tends to favour investment in covered or enclosed environments, and it has long been an argument for canopied high streets, covered markets, and the kind of physical environment that keeps a destination usable in poor weather.
For outdoor DOOH advertisers, the same redistribution affects audience: the people outside in the rain are fewer, but they are often moving quickly and purposefully. Weather-indexed audience data matters here, because reaching the right number of people at the right moment depends on knowing how many are actually out there.
Temperature: the slow, consistent signal
Rain creates dramatic but relatively brief disruptions. Temperature is quieter but operates continuously and at scale.
The Weather Channel’s 2015 Weathernomics report found that a seasonal temperature just 1°C above or below the norm can be enough to produce a disappointing quarter for a fashion retailer.
In a sector the size of UK retail, worth hundreds of billions of pounds annually, this equates to significant aggregate shifts in revenue.
The temperature effect plays out differently by category. Cold snaps slow footfall for fashion and home stores while boosting grocery and certain convenience categories. Warm periods pull people outdoors and into leisure, sometimes away from enclosed retail environments. An unseasonably warm October is bad news for anyone who bought heavily into autumn knitwear. A colder-than-average May strands summer clothing ranges before they have moved.
Unlike rain, temperature shifts are often predictable enough to plan around. Seasonal forecasting, which factors expected temperature deviations into buying and staffing decisions, is a well-established practice among larger retailers. The difficulty for most operators is that they lack the baseline footfall data to know how sensitive their specific location is to a temperature deviation of a given magnitude.
Why “it rained” is not a complete explanation
The weather effect is real, and it is also the most convenient excuse available for almost any trading shortfall. A manager who blames every quiet Saturday on the weather is not lying (there was probably some weather), but they may be missing a real performance problem hidden underneath the meteorological noise.
The only way to resolve this is a measured baseline that captures what footfall normally looks like for a given date in the retail year’s calendar, a given day in the weekly rhythm, and a given weather condition. Cities and municipalities running footfall programmes to understand the health of their town centres face exactly this problem: if footfall is down in March, is that the wet spring or is it structural decline?
Without a weather-adjusted baseline, the answer is a guess. With one, the data can begin to separate the two: a footfall shortfall on a wet day that matches the expected weather penalty is a weather event; a shortfall that persists on comparable fair-weather days is something that warrants a different response.
Building the adjusted baseline
The data output that makes weather normalisation possible is straightforward in principle: consistent, timestamped footfall counts logged over enough months to capture seasonal and weekly variation, combined with recorded weather conditions for each period. Over time, a model of expected footfall for any given condition emerges, and actual performance can be compared against it.
The statistics involved are not complex, and they give an answer that guesswork cannot: whether the trading environment is changing beneath the weather noise.
For outdoor advertising and city-level decision-making, the practical applications are similar. Audience or footfall targets set without weather context will be systematically missed in poor months and easily beaten in good ones, and neither outcome is very useful. Weather-adjusted baselines give planners and budget holders a consistent metric to assess against.
Separating signal from weather
Rain moves the high street, cold temperatures move retail sales, and named storms move both, visibly and fast. “It rained” is where an analysis starts.
The useful questions come next. Given that it rained, was the footfall hit larger or smaller than you would expect from a comparable event? Did the fair-weather days in the same week compensate? Was the performance of covered destinations up in proportion to the high-street loss?
None of those questions can be answered without a measured baseline: footfall data continuous enough and historic enough to tell you what normal looks like for this location, this time of year, this weather. That is what a footfall benchmark is actually worth: the ability to separate a weather event from a structural trend. And because the measurement uses the only footfall method in Europe approved by a data protection authority, that data is collected without recording a single named person’s journey.
Sources
- Jahshan, E. (2020, 18 February). Storms Ciara & Dennis leave big dents on UK retail footfall. Retail Gazette. https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2020/02/storms-ciara-dennis-leave-big-dents-uk-retail-footfall/
- Jahshan, E. (2020, 9 March). February footfall plunges 7.8% from severe rain & storms. Retail Gazette. https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2020/03/february-footfall-plunges-7-8-from-severe-rain-storms/
- Carrick, A. (2020, 9 March). Retail woes continue as high street footfall drops eight per cent. City A.M. https://www.cityam.com/retail-woes-continue-as-high-street-footfall-drops-eight-per-cent/
- Met Office (2020). Record breaking rainfall. Press release, 2 March 2020. https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/news-and-media/media-centre/weather-and-climate-news/2020/2020-winter-february-stats
- Roth Tran, B. (2022). The impact of weather on retail sales. FRBSF Economic Letter, 2022-23. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. https://www.frbsf.org/research-and-insights/publications/economic-letter/2022/08/impact-of-weather-on-retail-sales/
- Wightman-Stone, D. (2015). Weather cost fashion industry 700 million pounds. FashionUnited. https://fashionunited.uk/news/retail/weather-cost-fashion-industry-700-million-pounds/2015070716960
Curious what this looks like for your venue?
- 15.3%
- Footfall drop during Storm Ciara's weekend
- 16.3%
- Footfall decline during Storm Dennis's weekend
- 7.8%
- High-street footfall fall, February 2020
- 1°C
- Deviation from seasonal norm that can sour a quarter
Frequently asked questions
Does rain actually reduce high street footfall?
Yes, measurably. Heavy rainfall and storms consistently suppress footfall on open high streets, with the effect concentrated in the hours when the weather is worst. Covered retail destinations such as shopping centres and retail parks can pick up part of that trade as shoppers seek shelter, though this is not guaranteed and depends on the severity of conditions.
How much does a storm reduce retail footfall?
During Storms Ciara and Dennis in February 2020, UK footfall data reported by Retail Gazette showed footfall declining by 15.3% during Storm Ciara's weekend and 16.3% during Storm Dennis's. Over the month as a whole, high-street footfall fell 7.8%, while shopping centres fell 2.5% and retail parks 1.1%.
Does temperature affect footfall, not just rain?
Temperature matters too, though the effect is more gradual. The Weather Channel's 2015 Weathernomics report found that a seasonal temperature just 1°C above or below the norm can be enough to produce a disappointing quarter or year for a fashion retailer. Across the UK retail sector as a whole, that sensitivity adds up.
How do you separate weather effects from real trading problems?
With a measured baseline. If you know what your footfall normally is for a given day of the year and a given weather condition, you can compare any day's actual footfall against that weather-adjusted expectation. A footfall shortfall that coincides with heavy rain is a weather event; one that persists on fair-weather days is something else: a competitive shift, a reputation issue, or a structural trend.