NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Retailers complaining about how the weather's hurt their sales is a bit like boys crying wolf: You begin to doubt the tale.
But it looks like the wolf really came. The snowstorms that socked the Northeast Friday and Saturday kept shoppers out of the stores on what is usually one of the biggest shopping weekends of the year. There's no solid indication of exactly how bad things were, but a lousy take at the box office over the weekend suggests that sales weren't happy and bright.
Brimming with optimism that the economic recovery would make this year's holiday sales stellar, retailers are now forced to play catch up.
This shouldn't matter, right? After all, there are still plenty of shopping days between now and Christmas; we'll just pick up that electric nosehair trimmer for Dad next weekend.
But the word in the stores this holiday season (and it's a notion retailers have been pushing with shoppers) is that inventories are lighter than usual this time around. That means there won't be the same sort of last-ditch effort to clear the shelves right before and after Christmas that we've seen in the past. So no deep discounts: Get in there now or that gift you promised your loved ones isn't going to be there anymore.
At least that was the way it was supposed to go. After the weekend, stores are holding a lot more inventory in the busy Northeast than they expected. They can force a cheerful grin, and talk about how the snow merely postponed sales, rather than canceled them, but they have to be worried about that stock. While folks are trimming their trees, the stores will likely be trimming prices by a bit more than they'd planned. And profits will be a little less than they might have hoped.
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