“In a large city, the business of a department store is seriously hurt by rain in the forenoon, but rain in the early afternoon is usually a big help. Most customers of a big-city department store are women, and nearly all of them live some distance from the store--at the edge of the city or in the suburbs. If it rains along about eight or nine o’clock in the morning, the woman who had planned to go shopping that day is quite likely to change her mind, even though she did not intend to go until afternoon. The rain not only suggests discomfort in getting about, but diminishes her desire or immediate need for certain articles, and drives the shopping idea out of her head. On the other hand, if it is bright and clear in the morning, but clouds up about noon for a heavy downpour which lasts most of the afternoon, it is the best thing that could happen for the department store, because shoppers get in and cannot comfortably get out. They shop all over the store, buy luncheon there, and shop some more. While the rain is thus helping the department stores, it may hurt the smaller shops, because many customers who would otherwise look around are obliged to do their buying all under one roof.” No aspect of business more faithfully reflects the weather, or, in a somewhat less degree, the weather forecasts, than advertising. So important is it, in many lines of business, to make advertising fit the weather that one might expect merchants to be, as a class, as weather-wise as sailors and farmers. A page of advertising in a great metropolitan newspaper is a costly investment. If, for example, it invites the public to pay a Sunday visit of inspection to some haven for homeseekers in the suburbs and Sunday turns out to be the kind of day that converts building-lots into bogs, the advertiser will perhaps be led to inquire whether there is not some means of avoiding another such fiasco; and he may thus make the surprising discovery that meteorology is not entirely a theoretical science. The conjunction of a conspicuously advertised sale of rubbers and a soppy week-day morning may be either a lucky accident or the result of studying the weather map. In the former case, supposing the business to be conducted in the northeastern United States, where dry weather is about twice as common as wet, the odds would be two to one against the occurrence even of light showers on the day the advertisement appeared, and three or four to one against the occurrence of such weather as would make the advertisement decidedly _à propos_.