Winter Storm Demand Trends, Outlet Share 2025 vs. 2024

Winter Storm Fern, a Category 3 storm that stretched primarily from January 23 to January 27, 2026, created widespread disruption across the national retail unleaded gasoline market. In the week of the storm, the national average same-store week-over-week gasoline demand fell by more than 20% according to OPIS’ DemandPro, a proportional drop not seen since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. In several regions, the decline was even more dramatic, exceeding pandemic-era pullbacks and ranking as the steepest demand drop observed since OPIS began tracking volumes more than a decade ago.

In many winter events, demand tends to follow a familiar three-step pattern.

First comes a pre-storm lift as motorists top off their tanks and prepare for travel disruptions. Next is the storm-week downswing, when hazardous roads, closures, and canceled travel suppress fueling. Finally, as conditions improve, demand typically rebounds and begins to normalize as regular trips resume and local routines restart.

Fern broadly followed this pattern, but what set it apart was the extreme magnitude of the swings, particularly the storm-week collapse relative to what is usually seen in winter weather-driven events.

To put Fern’s impact in context, it helps to compare it to other major winter storms.

Winter Storm Kenan (January 28-29, 2022) was a Category 1 blizzard that primarily impacted the Northeast. Regional same-store OPIS demand data showed a “roller coaster” pattern: an 8.2% increase during the week ending January 29, followed by about a 7% decrease in the week ending February 5, then around a 7.5% rebound the week after. Even with those sharp moves, Kenan’s swings were not as substantial as Fern’s. But timing matters here: OPIS demand data is tracked on a weekly basis ending on Saturdays. A storm landing on Friday, as Kenan did, can pull both pre-storm fill-ups and storm-day demand suppression into the same reporting week, which can soften the appearance of the event’s peak impacts.

A closer analogue to Fern is Winter Storm Uri (the Great Texas Freeze, February 13-17, 2021), also a Category 3 storm that affected a large portion of the U.S. Nationally, Uri showed a more typical storm structure with average demand falling and recovering by around 7%. However, the national result was muted likely because the storm’s most severe impacts were concentrated in the Southwest where the decline and subsequent rebound was closer to 20%.

Across winter storms, the market often behaves predictably, but the data itself can look unpredictable. Fern’s market disruption reinforces one key takeaway however: storm-driven demand shocks can be severe enough to rival pandemic-era volatility.

Taken together, these storms are a reminder that the most useful lens is a consistent, same-store view that helps put the spike-and-dip consumer storm pattern into context. Granular tools like DemandPro empower you to do so, helping you to understand when and where the disruption occurred, not just how large the national average move appears.

See national and regional demand trends from these storms.

Reporting by Ben Kaufmann, bkaufmann@opisnet.com