It wasn't just roads and schools that shut down Monday. Businesses from restaurants and malls to Fortune 500 companies to small mom-and-pop start-ups kept their doors closed, costing what could be hundreds of thousands on dollars in lost revenue, business owners said.
"It will be in the tens of thousands," Robby Kukler, a partner in Fifth Group Restaurants, said about closing the restaurateur's five eateries on Monday. Fifth Group operates such popular restaurants as South City Kitchen Vinings, El Taco and Ecco.
Conversely, for agencies that provide essential public services, the drifts of snow translated to dollars spent.
Mercer University economist Roger Tutterow said the weather "clearly does have an [economic] impact," although he said he hasn't seen it quantified.
Unfortunately, what are sometimes regarded as positive economic impacts of bad weather can be overrated, Tutterow said, such as when shoppers race to grocery stores and load up on bread, milk and other essential items.
In those cases, he said, "People are shifting forward expenditures that might have occurred anyway."
One positive note: Many businesses that would have been negatively affected a decade or so ago, prior to the widespread use of computers, now can rely on employees to continue working at home when bad weather keeps them from the office.
Not the airlines, though.
If December storms were any indication, January's snowstorms will cost Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines millions of dollars. Delta last week said it already expects to take a $45 million hit to its bottom line from December's winter storms, which caused it to cancel more than 3,000 flights.
Delta canceled about 500 flights Sunday and nearly 2,000 Monday. The carrier said it would fly a reduced schedule Tuesday, planning more than 1,400 flight cancellations. Spokeswoman Betsy Talton said it's too early to tell what the total impact will be.
AirTran Airways canceled all Monday flights in and out of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
"Obviously the impact is huge, not only in lost revenue, in lost opportunities, but it's also huge in extra expenses, said spokesman Christopher White. That includes extra costs for deicing fluid, deicing equipment, overtime and hotel rooms for employees.
Similarly, the State Department of Transportation anticipates spending as much as $3 million over two days to deal with this storm, officials said Monday. Three thousand state employees were working 12-hour shifts, said DOT spokesman David Spear.
Storms with a smaller geographic footprint generally run about $1 million a day in materials and personnel costs, Spear said. “But this one is more widespread."
The DOT set aside $10 million just to deal with weather events this winter, he said, estimating that by the time road conditions return to normal the state will have burned through about half of those reserves.
For the neighborhoods they serve, MARTA trains became a sort of economic lifeline Monday.
“My car just wouldn’t cut it,” Todd Wheeler, an anesthesiologist, wrote an ajc.com blog. He walked two miles to his MARTA station and took the train to Medical Center Station.
Hospital administrators around the city had already set plans in motion to keep their doors open, arranging to house staff and stocking up on food and water.
“We kind of handle this similar to the way we would handle a disaster or a crisis – we look at everything,” said Lance Skelly, spokesman for Emory Health System's hospitals.
Atlanta Medical Center reserved a block of rooms at a nearby hotel in addition to setting up temporary quarters at the hospital. “If you’re in health care, you know it’s 24/7,” said Robert Russell, the center's chief operating officer.
Piedmont Hospital, which also housed staff overnight, called on some managers to care for patients. “Anybody that can is in scrubs doing what they can to help out,” said Jim Taylor, a Piedmont Hospital spokesman.
Although the Georgia Supreme Court will be closed at least until Wednesday, Chief Justice Carol Hunstein published a unanimous opinion Monday in a death sentence appeal -- one of nearly a dozen opinions issued by the court.
“Even though we’re all stuck at home, because of this electronic filing system, we’re able to electronically issue the opinions,” said court spokeswoman Jane Hansen.
On the other hand, 15 oral arguments won’t be heard, and that backlog must be cleared without delay. “It’s like a house of cards,” Hansen said. “Once a case is formally docketed, it must be decided in two court terms [six months] according to the state constitution.”
The weather did not stop the 5,400 conventioneers in town for the American Farm Bureau meeting at the Georgia World Congress Center. About 80 percent of members made it to the meeting Monday, said Farm Bureau spokeswoman Tracy Grondine.
Hoteliers Carl Dees, general manager of the Georgia Terrace, and Ed Walls, general manager at the Westin Peachtree Plaza, said rooms were 65 percent and 80 percent full respectively, both strong numbers for January.
At UPS, spokeswoman Susan Rosenberg said the economic impact of missing a day's worth of pickups and deliveries would be minimal. "When we resume the next day, we just pick up from there," she said. "We can recover from a day real quickly."
Alas, some sports bars were not so lucky: The BCS game comes but once a year. A few bars chose to open Monday night, but others bowed to the superior forces of Mother Nature.
Staff writers Marcus K. Garner, Arielle Kass, David Markiewicz, Ariel Hart and Carrie Teegardin contributed to this article.
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