While the five-day deluge that swamped Southern California through Tuesday morning may be a thing of the past, area businesses taking stock of the situation saw it is a mixed blessing.

Traffic snarls made travel a headache during the torrential rains, but that did not keep many from venturing to regional malls over the weekend, where foot traffic was said to be up. At Macerich Co.’s Los Cerritos Center, traffic rose 15 percent on Saturday compared to the year ago period, while Sunday traffic was up 1 percent.

Todd Putman, executive vice president of marketing for Westfield Corp. Inc., said he visited Fashion Square in Sherman Oaks, Topanga in Canoga Park and Promenade in Woodland Hills over the weekend and that all three were “packed.”

“We know for a fact when it rains like this, especially in Southern California, people go to the malls because there’s nothing else to do.”

The building trades did not fare as well.

Inclement weather brought activity at nearly every construction site throughout the region to a halt, according to Ray Pearl, executive director of the Building Industry Association of Southern California.

“As for hammer and nails, not in weather like this,” he said. “Anytime there’s weather like this it impacts construction.”

Still, he said, while the rains were an annoyance for builders, the weather problems won’t likely have long-term economic consequences on the local industry. “Certainly this has an economic impact. Time is money and when you are delaying time it impacts construction schedules,” Pearl said. “But the impact is a short-term impact, not a long term one.”

Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp., agreed, saying that on scale of one to 10, the disruption caused by the seemingly incessant rain ranked between two and three.

“You are going to have to remember that the Los Angeles economy is very, very large,” he said. “It is going to be tough to get dollar estimates.”

Some of the winners included enclosed malls and movie theaters packed with customers who might otherwise have frequented storm-related business losers such as outdoor malls and amusement parks. Hardest hit were construction companies, restaurants, golf courses and car washes. On the labor front, the biggest impact was be felt by day laborers and temporary workers who depend on daily employment, often from construction jobs.

Overall, Keyser said, the storms hit at a good time for the regional economy, which generally lows after the holiday season.

The post-holiday low pressure system brining the rain was expected to continue until Tuesday morning, when it stopped right on schedule.

By Tuesday morning much of the wet weather moved eastward, bringing an end to an onslaught of rain that brought season total rainfall amounts to more than 20 inches in downtown L.A. Normal rainfall amounts for an entire season run 14 inches.

The series of storms were the result of a low-pressure system off the coast fed by a stream of moisture from the southern Pacific known as the “Pineapple Express.”