Cold cuts into sales for small businesses

NEW YORK — When the temperature in New York plunged, so did revenue at Tanya Lim’s dog-walking service.

Many of Lim’s clients were among the people who decided to work from home because of the cold, so they didn’t need her services. On a day when she and her three fellow dog-walkers would normally have had 15 pets to walk, Play Pals NYC had none. One of Lim’s staff members made some cat-sitting visits, but all their other appointments were canceled.

“The first week after the holidays usually everyone is back working, but we’re not,” said Lim, who didn’t charge for the cancellations.

The severe cold and snow over the past few weeks hurt many small businesses. Restaurants and retailers were among those that suffered the most because few people wanted to go out, according to Planalytics, a company that analyzes the effect of weather on businesses.

It’s true that severe winter weather can be a moneymaker for some businesses like plumbers and heating repair companies. But many businesses found it harder to operate — cities like Philadelphia, Detroit and Charlotte, N.C., had their coldest first week of January ever. Chicago’s average temperature was 18 degrees lower than usual, and Atlanta’s was 15 degrees below normal.

Snow and ice are rare in Charleston, S.C., but they caused the cancellation of events including a conference that Karen Moran expected to cater. Moran, owner of Sweet Lulu’s Bakery & Cocktail Caravan, also wasn’t able to make deliveries because bridges and roads were closed. She estimates that she lost $10,000 in revenue.

“Canceling that kind of big corporate event kind of does us in,” she said. “We’re not starting the new year off with our normal big push.”

The weather can wreak havoc with a company’s products as well as its operations. Soon after Linda Parry Murphy’s Product Launchers company in Pennsylvania shipped bottles of a new fruit and/or herb-flavored beverage called Agroposta to customers, emails started arriving: The liquid had frozen and the bottles burst in transit.

Murphy and her team have now found ways to insulate cold-weather shipments, and the good news is that shipments to some Safeway were just samples.