Over the past week, people in the Northeast have been dealing with the after math of the blizzard that struck over the holiday weekend, but even worse hit are retailers that lost out on huge post-Christmas holiday shopping as people were forced to stay at home.

While it is impossible to put an exact number on just how much retailers lost out on, ShopperTrak, who tracks sales and customer traffic at over 70,000 stores and malls, estimated that retailers lost around $1 billion during the blizzard.

The second best shopping day of the holiday season didn't come until after the festivities ended. Dec. 26, 2009 wasn't good enough to top Black Friday, but data from ShopperTrak shows that it did shoot past the last Saturday before Christmas, which is usually among the top days of the holiday season. This year, that Saturday wasn't able to realize its potential because of a snowstorm that smacked the East Coast.

Store traffic fell 6.6% from 2008 for the day after Christmas, but sales still reached $7.9 billion. Analysts expected the the first post-holiday shopping day to assume more importance, largely because of the storm a week earlier

Anxious to grab every last dollar they can out of holiday shoppers, retailers are pulling out all the stops. Especially given the snowstorm on the East Coast last week, they have to make up some ground, and time is running out. They lost the Saturday before Christmas, one of the busiest shopping days of the year -- and a favorite of people like me who wait until the last minute.

"Super Saturday," as it's called, was off close to 13% compared to last year, says research firm ShopperTrak. Only $6.9 billion came in, off $1 billion-year-over-year. And, let's not forget that 2008 was a drag. Its $7.9 billion performance was down from $8.7 billion in 2007.

The online push from Black Friday continued into Cyber Monday. Coremetrics, a web analytics company, found that sales were up 19.6% year-over-year as of 1:00 PM Monday. Online may account for only 10% of spending during the holiday season (7% overall), but it remains the bright spot in what has been a lackluster kickoff to the holiday season.

Black Friday spending was up only 0.5% this year, though Black Friday online spending jumped 35%. For Friday and Saturday, ShopperTrak reports that retail sales were up 0.9% to $16.77 billion, while customer traffic dropped 2.7%.

All the hope and hype that went into Black Friday preparations this year didn't give us much. Year-over-year, retail sales grew only 0.5%, from $10.61 billion to $10.66 billion, according to ShopperTrak. This follows a 3% gain last year, when the world was gripped by the panic triggered by the global financial crisis. In 2007, the situation was much better, with Black Friday sales leaping 8.3%.

The slight gain this year came even with the extra efforts retailers made, which included, in some cases, opening on Thanksgiving Day and making an extra push via social media. These measures effectively helped retailers tread water.

Holiday retails sales may have been even worse than expected. It is hard to think why that would be a surprise. Consumer confidence numbers for December hit an all-time low. How does the retail industry get people that depressed to shop?

According to Bloomberg, "Holiday sales probably decreased 2.3 percent and traffic dropped 16 percent during November and December, ShopperTrak RCT Corp. estimated."

The numbers are misleading and may make people think that the holidays were not so bad for stores. After all, a drop of 2% can't be that bad. That figure does not take into account the fact that many chains and individual stores cut prices over 50%. The potential profit on the items which were cut that much may have disappeared. As a matter of fact, some companies probably took losses on parts of their inventories so they would not have items on their shelves that they could not sell at all after the first of the year.

The other issue is that while sales may have dropped 2.3% across the industry, that number was significantly worse at some chains. According to data from ChangeWave, consumers planned to make drastic cuts in spending at Sears (NASDAQ:SHLD), Macy's (NYSE:M), and Bed, Bath & Beyond (NASDAQ:BBBY). In other words, all retailers are not created equal. Some will show large losses for the fourth quarter, and are more likely to close stores and cut staff.

Other than that, everything was fine.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

ShopperTrak RCT Corp says that retail sales on Black Friday rose 8.3% according to a report at Bloomberg. "It's an extraordinary number, beyond what we anticipated,'' Bill Martin, co-founder of ShopperTrak, said in an interview with the news service. The research firm says that sales on Friday are usually about 5% of all holiday sales.

What the report fails to say, but should concern retailers, is how much they had to give up on pricing to get customers into stores. If foot traffic was not high enough for some chains, it is likely that they will move prices down on some items again in an attempt to clear out inventory by the end of December.

The National Retail Federation in Washington only expects sales to rise 4% in November and December, a number that is not enough to support any real recovery in the retail sector, which has been hurt by both fuel prices and softness in the housing industry.

If late November sales are running better than expected, it may cause a turnaround in Wall Street's expectation for the holiday and lift shares in companies like Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT). It would also point to unanticipated strength in consumer spending.

Economists still expect that, if there is a recession, the consumer, who has kept the economy afloat for so long, will lead the fall into negative growth. The theory is that he has simply carried US spending on his back for too long.

What if he actually has the strength to carry it further?

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.