Cold Weather & Retail Sales

The excuse du jour that I've been hearing is that cold weather in February is to blame for under performance at certain retailers. Just for fun, here's a temp map I threw together off the NOAA site comparing last month to average temps over the past century. Yep, it was February and its was cold as it usually is.

What I'd like to do is strip out the Midwest and Northeast retail data where it was mostly below normal temp-wise and just look at figures from the rest of the country where temps were average to see if the cold really adversely impacted total retail sales. In other words, were sales (read consumer spending) stronger than usual where weather was average or better than average? I am not reading anywhere that the deep South and the West kept retail sales from looking even worse.

Somehow I think this "cold weather" thing doesn't tell the whole story.