At first while walking down the streets I noticed the traffic lights were down which isn’t too usual as it happens from time to time. But walking further it became evident that an entire block didn’t have any power which forced many to close their shops. You could see all these hand made notes of shops simply stating they are closed for the time being due to the power outage. Some remained opened but couldn’t take electronic transactions of course.
Would you ever prepare for situations like this as I would imagine for smaller businesses the idea of having a backup power generator isn’t exactly on the preparation list considering you pay the rent and assume things like these will be taken care of. But the payment aspect of running a store nowadays is an issue when the power goes down if you only accept digital payments. It reminds me of the situation similar to when Rogers went down here that pretty much killed all types of transactions that relied on its network.
I suppose it’s an example too where we are not quite there in terms of being able to rely on every to be digital when operating a traditional storefront.