ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, January 10, 1996 TAG: 9601100054
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MEGAN SCHNABEL STAFF WRITER
While kids took to the snowy hills with sleds and inner tubes Tuesday, Roanoke retailers stayed inside with their receipts and calculators, tallying up their losses.
"Snow always hurts," said Dan Lauer, manager of the Kmart discount store on Franklin Road.
Kmart did a booming business in shovels and sleds Saturday, he said, but was closed Sunday. The store reopened Monday, but sales haven't returned to normal levels yet, he said.
"There's no way, really, to recover it, either," he said. "Think about it: Are you going to go out now and spend all the money you didn't spend over the last few days?''
According to figures from the Virginia Department of Taxation, sales of all taxable goods in the Roanoke Valley and Franklin and Bedford counties averaged more than $7 million a day in 1994; in the New River Valley, average daily sales totaled more than $2 million. If all stores were closed by snow Sunday and Monday, that would mean lost sales of more than $18 million.
The snow days come on top of what for many stores was a slow Christmas season, when low consumer demand translated into poor sales for retailers. Lauer said his company is in relatively good shape, since it saw a 5.5 percent increase this Christmas from last year.
"Not to say this doesn't hurt," he said. "Any time you lose money, it hurts. But it didn't hurt us as much as some others."
One of the biggest problems retailers faced Tuesday was rounding up enough employees to staff the stores. Tom Tyree, manager of the Leggett department store at Valley View Mall, said he picked up two of his assistant managers in his four-wheel-drive vehicle Tuesday morning. He wanted to make sure, he said, that he wasn't the only one at the store.
Tuesday afternoon, Leggett was nearly empty, he said.
"I'd like to be in the grocery store business," he said. "People can do without buying a sale shirt."
But Tyree said the results could have been worse.
"If you're going to have bad days like this, it's good that they came at the slowest time," Tyree said. Sundays and Mondays in January typically aren't busy days for retailers anyway, he said. If the weather holds up, he said, the store may be able to make up its losses next weekend.
Across Roanoke, stores began to dig out and reopen to Roanokers with cabin fever.
Both Valley View and Tanglewood malls opened at noon Tuesday, after being closed Monday. Tanglewood plans to be open from noon to 5 p.m. today; Mike Thornton, manager of Valley View, said Tuesday afternoon that the mall's hours for today hadn't been decided yet. No one could be reached at New River Valley Mall.
"We probably should have just stayed closed today and let them work on the parking lot," Monty Bibb, manager of Stein Mart at Tanglewood, said Tuesday. Most stores were operating with skeleton crews, he said, and few customers had braved the snowy roads.
Bill Weld of Ram's Head Book Shop estimated that about a third of the stores at Towers Shopping Center in Roanoke were open Tuesday. He said the book store planned to be open regular hours today, weather permitting.
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