Truthfully I had no real problem turning away customers all day, there was nothing we could do. Their logic behind it was just frustrating. If the store has to close under circumstances like that then we all would still have to be paid for our shift, so they figured “if we have to pay you either way, you’re going to be doing what we want you to do”.

Unfortunately, no. The end of the story is 1 hour before closing time an electrician was finally able to move around some of the power supply and get us to half power, just enough to get our POS system and wi-fi running, but nothing else. We’re union and our attendance is on a point system so no one wanted to take any points by leaving and we can’t all walk out at once or it could be considered a strike that wasn’t authorized by the union and we’d all be laid off.

I work in telecommunications sales and one day our store got struck by lightning overnight, completely fried the master breaker and we had no power, no AC, no backup generator. just dim emergency lights that run off auxiliary power. They absolutely refused to let us close. Power company came by and pretty much said “yep, enjoy the day off guys.. you won’t be getting power anytime soon”. They still refused to close, we couldn’t help any customers or even clock in/out… at that point it was costing the company more money in labor to keep all of us there than it would have to just close the store for the day. Still doesn’t make any sense to me.