Here are some excuses. ‘We bought the wrong merchandise and offered it at the wrong time.’ ‘The stores look old and in need of a shot in the arm.’ ‘Our staff are a bit rude.’ ‘The executive board’s away-day to Mars has taken rather longer than anticipated.’

To varying degrees, all of these sound a little lame, but no more so than blaming the weather for lacklustre performance. Indeed, of all the get-out-of-jail cards that can be produced, the weather is the one that is likely to be met with the most skepticism, as it is the most commonly produced. Isn’t there weather every year and some years it’s sunny, while others bring snow, hail and rain? And the point about the weather is that when one door shuts, another tends to open and the smart retailer takes steps to ensure that some of the bases, at least, are covered.

When Debenhams blamed snow for tough trading last week, the question that went unanswered was what might be done to improve the supply chain in order to take advantage of the adverse weather – more coats, more quickly perhaps. And Debenhams is far from being on its own. There are plenty of others who will turn to the weather when things have not gone quite as expected.

It’s perfectly possible, of course, that snow will affect shoppers’ ability to storm the stores. But equally, there are a lot of other factors that come into play when a decision is made to go shopping or to frequent a particular store.

This is not therefore a plea for turning things on their head, but using local climatic variation as the sole reason for poor performance is a trifle rich. And by the way, this column could have been considerably wider in its scope had it not been for a freak rain storm that knocked out the main server and with it the remaining 200 or 300 words that were appended to this - as if…

And by the by, there were a few retailers that actually managed to perform reasonably well over.