Weatherfail

[altivo]

Once again the NWS overestimates the power of a storm by an order of magnitude it seems. Their dire storm that was supposed to produce 8 - 12 inches of snow overnight barely made it to three. I could have used a snow day, too

Comments

[captpackrat]

We were supposed to get 6 inches of snow yesterday but didn't get a thing. The storm hit the county to the south of us, but managed to miss us completely.

[altivo]

They were very specific with this forecast, but utterly wrong. I don't think anyone in the area got even half the predicted amount of precipitation.

[dakhun]

People stock up before a snowstorm, so there's not going to be as many people in grocery stores after such a weather event. The one thing it cannot be is the "recession". People always have to eat, so your regular run-of-the-mill non-boutique grocery stores are not a good place to gauge whether there's a recession or not.

[altivo]

I understand your logic but still disagree. There are additional factors in this, one of which is greatly increased penetration of WalMart into the area. Where the local WalMart used to be a small store, it was replaced by a "superstore" with what the evil empire considers to be "full supermarket" included. Harvard has been a very tight economy for a decade now, since Motorola closed their huge plant there, and WalMart is sucking the life out of the independent and even chain stores in the town. Sullivan's remains the largest grocery store in town, but not by much

[dakhun]

The coincidental timing of the recession with your local Walmart expansion would have accelerated the effects of competition. But I personally still see it as mainly competition, given that food is a necessity. Because if Walmart had not expanded, your independent grocery stores would collectively have the same total number of people in them as before the recession. However, I can definitely see how one could argue it either way, as it was really a double-whammy in this particular instance, as you said

[altivo]

Interesting article, though based on what's stated in that item I'm not sure I would draw the conclusions they give. WalMart may well fail to retain customers temporarily attracted away from more expensive retailers, but there are other reasons that are frequently ignored in the analyses I've seen

[avon_deer]

I have often wondered what makes wolf get cried so often when it comes to forecasting.

[altivo]

I used to think it was the commercial media with their hunger for drama and sensationalism, but now that I take my information entirely from the official source and bypass the media I still see the same exaggerated forecasts.

I suppose there may be some fear of being charged with failure to warn in the case of a severe storm, but now they really are getting into the realm where no one believes them. They issue real warnings for violent weather events like tornadoes and high winds and people just ignore it and continue their usual business.

[avon_deer]

From that point of view they probably are damned if they do and damned if they don't. :/

[altivo]

To some extent yes, but it's their own fault. When, as I've said before, they will state flatly that the skies are partly sunny yet one has only to look out a window to see that it is completely overcast and pouring rain, their credibility is obviously going to decline. Some people in powerful positions evidently think that computer models are more accurate than field observations.

[cabcat]

They did a test on the telly car show "Top Gear" where they had to race a letter mailed from the Southern most part of the UK, to the Northern most part in a Porsche Panemera. They had a lot of great facts about the UK's "Royal Mail" the letter one the race interestingly enough.

[altivo]

The answer to this one was a typically bizarre US thing. The package came the next day, not by UPS but in the regular mail. It's something like a hybrid delivery service that we're seeing now where UPS or Fedex deliver a package to the closest post office, and the postal service does the end delivery part. It adds an extra day to the process but must be somehow cheaper for the shipper.

Works all right as long as you know that's what they're doing. In this case, I didn't know. Usually the tracking from Fedex tells you the package was "delivered to post office at 60152 zip" or something. UPS makes it look as if it was delivered and then is still in transit, which is weird.