All the snow this winter has wrecked your mood, but probably not Pennsylvania's economy

Jeff Frantz By Jeff Frantz The Patriot-News
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on February 20, 2014 at 3:26 PM

All those snow days closing down businesses this winters must have Pennsylvania's economy teetering, right?

It sounds so correct, in theory.

But, in the big picture, economists say the economic freeze is a myth.

When it snows a lot, people do stay home from work. Construction projects get stalled, shipments get delayed and shoppers can't get to the store. All that is true, but when it comes to the health of the state's economy, it probably doesn't matter.

We won't have the statistics to prove it for several months, but the evidence from the past says we'll be OK.

"If they're not going to go out this week, they're going to go out next week," said PNC regional economist Kurt Rankin. "Construction always dips during the winter. That will pick up."

More companies are able to be productive on snow days because of the number of people who can work from home. Many shoppers cut off from brick and mortar stores will spend their snow days browsing the internet.

Some factories did have to close because workers couldn't make it in. But because many of those factories are producing good that have already been ordered, Rankin said, they'll have to make up the orders, and that can involve paying employees overtime.

Some other things balance each other out. People staying home because of storms spend less on gas, but more on heating costs.

Nationally, the US economy has slowed since the snow began in December. But it's important not to confuse correlation with causation.

"The slower pace of growth indicated by recent data may have less to do with weather and more to do with some tempering from a solid second half of 2013," according to a report Wells Fargo Securities published earlier this month.

Closer to home, the Harrisburg market saw employment slack off in some areas in December, Rankin said. But that followed the same pattern in the region for the last decade.

This year's storms were generally one-day events for many people and businesses in the midstate. If we had been socked with a 1996-style blizzard that shut the state down for a week -- keep your fingers crossed, it is still winter -- it might have registered further.

That's not to say individuals haven't been hurt by the winter. They still had to pay those higher heating bills. And many people who couldn't get to work for a day couldn't get paid.

Many of the companies that call the Drexel Group for temporary workers have cancelled several times this winter because they didn't open for the day, according to hospitality manager Heidi Weyer. Every time that happened, it meant between 50 and 75 people didn't get to work that day, Weyer said.