There are at least three theories about how the huge and destructive storms that have washed across the United States and will hit the East Coast tomorrow will affect retail sales. The first is that people will drive to malls because they have nothing to do when it is snowing and raining. The next is that they will stay home and watch TV because the weather is bad. The third is that people will stay home, warm and safe, and order their holiday gifts online.

Retail sales have been hurt in the past by nasty weather. This week in some parts of the United States, particularly the Plains States and Southwest, storms have already caused extensive damage. People may want to drive to stores, but snow-clogged roads would make that difficult, if they stay snow-clogged.

The people who sit at home and do next to nothing might realize that there are only 29 shopping days until Christmas. They could still rush to stores on Thanksgiving and Black Friday. By that time, almost all the storms will have passed. This means the case that in-store retail sales will be undermined by weather is weak. Shoppers will get the really big sales while the sun shines, or at least the weather is no more than partly cloudy.

That leaves e-commerce. Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) is an ideal place for shut-ins to shop. But for people to really become shut in during the balance of the holiday season, there will have to be at least one more significant wave of storms that washes across most of the country and shuts down large areas for days. Unless that weather catastrophe happens, e-commerce firms will get no more than the market share experts forecast.

The weather, some experts argue, would hurt store traffic at the end of this week. But it won’t. The United States will have dried out by the time people push back from the dinner table on Thanksgiving and start to shop in earnest.

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