The tornado warning reached Bel Air, Maryland, one afternoon this summer. The local college closed, and emergency alerts told people to stay off roads that were already flooding. Pamela Lauer was away from The Dance Shop when the warning went out, so she called her staff and told them to lock up and go.
Two customers refused to leave. It was the only time they had to shop, they said. So, while Lauer kept the store closed to new shoppers, she was forced to stay open for those who wouldn’t leave. Three hours later the warning lifted and everyone went home.
The episode captures one of the hardest questions a retail owner can face in severe weather: when to close and when to stay open. Be it snow, flooding, extreme heat, or severe storms, individuals can decide for themselves whether a trip to the store is worth the risk. Retailers, however, have to weigh that risk for everyone—themselves, their employees, their customers, and their business. So, how can they judge when the risks of staying open outweigh the costs of closing?
Making the Call
Lauer has owned The Dance Shop, a store associated with County Ballet dance studio, since 1991. She has long been responsible for deciding when to close in severe weather, and does not take that call lightly: Her staff live across the county, and 20 minutes of driving can be the difference between clear pavement and a sheet of ice.
Maryland, she says, encompasses the whole country in one state—there’s mountains at one end, ocean at the other. What ends up closing her store is usually relatively dull. It’s a snowplow that never comes, trees down across the power lines in her parking lot, or a flooded road. Ice is the worst of it, because it takes the power with it, and nobody drives well on ice.
Lauer owns her building, which means she also owns the maintenance and the liability. A slip-and-fall claim she calls bogus took three years to be declared unsubstantiated in court. Experiences like that have a way of lingering. When a forecast turns, they become part of the decision-making process.
At my store, From the Top, a dance, cheer, and gymnastics boutique in Waco, TX, I outsource the decision. Most of my associates are students at Baylor University, while the rest are still in high school. If Baylor and the local districts have decided their people should not be on the road, I don’t overrule them. When ice came in 2025 they closed for a week, and we closed with them.
When the Weather Does Not Ask
In 2017, Hurricane Irma opened a 10-foot hole in the stockroom roof at Melbourne Dancewear, a store on Florida’s east coast. The inventory survived undamaged. Most of her supplies did not, and everything left in the building had to come out before mold and mildew set in.
But the store’s owner, Kitty Hatton, stayed open for business. A couple who owned Apocalypse Coffee, a neighboring shop at the far end of the strip mall, offered her their lobby, and she ran the store out of it for three and a half months while her own unit was gutted and re-roofed. Dance moms turned up to move her, one of them eight months pregnant, with friends and family behind them.
The memories are painful ones to revisit, Hatton says, admitting that hearing the rain on the store roof still gives her the willies. But she’ll never forget the “unimaginable kindness” she experienced during that time. Hatton lost business, but she gained the love of many people.
Financial Sacrifices
When bad weather keeps customers away, Lauer says it’s natural to lose out financially. Even the customers who would not leave during her aforementioned closure ended up ordering from Amazon after all, she heard. Yet she still tried to capture whatever business she could. Lauer put a discount offer on the door, her business voicemail, and the store’s website. Even in treacherous conditions, she can usually walk to the store, pull the merchandise herself, and hand it off in a cleared parking lot. Though in a blizzard once, she made it only 10 feet and thought she was going to die.
Our ice week at From the Top went differently. Nothing else was open: The studios were dark and Amazon was not delivering either, so customers had nowhere to go and waited for us. Hatton’s three-and-a-haf-month relocation was long enough that some of hers did leave, even though she was trading the whole time, 40 yards down the sidewalk.
The Bottom Line
A closed door for an afternoon is a rain check. A closed door for a season is a decision somebody else makes on your behalf, unless you can find a lobby.
Lauer has learned to make something of the weather rather than simply wait it out. In the past, her store has run contests encouraging customers to build a snow sculpture using Dance Shop merchandise, post a photo, and enter to win a $25 gift certificate. One year, the result was a snow lady in a pink tutu, standing in the drifts beside the studio’s registration sign.
Lauer worked out her own opinion on how to deal with severe weather a long time ago. The store is a community service, she says, not a way to get rich. Take the money out of the equation, what is left is safety, and the decision makes itself. The two customers who would not leave never had to run that math.
Jessie Reid is the owner of From the Top, a dance, cheer, and gymnastics boutique in Waco, TX, and a dance mom.