have you ever been in a store and the electricity failed? Registers don't work, doors don't open?

Yes..once when I was grocery shopping. The doors still opened though...and I used them promptly.

I must have been in the same place Cody was! I was in Kroger's too! LOL

I have run a (small) store with no electricity. With no electricity I couldn't pump any gas but I figured I sure as heck could sell cigarettes, pop and candy. And I did; I was the busiest place in town. I just wrote everything down and used a solar calculator if I needed to add up quickly. A cash register is nothing more than a fancy adding machine, anyway. I used the old ker-chunk credit card imprinters. When the electricity came back on and everything was rung up, I was within $1.00 after over $2000 worth of sales. Ha! Let these kids who have my job now and can't figure out 10% of 100 do that!

Yes, I have been in a store when the electricity went out. It got pretty dark in there, but I was up by the register at the front of the store so the windows let it some light. It was only off briefly.

I was stationed in Japan in the early 70's at the Navy Commissary in Yokohama. Several times the power went out. People shopped by the light of emergency lighting. Sailors stood by at the registers and cranked the machines by hand (like the old manual registers). No one complained, just went about their shopping like normal.

We depend too much on technology for almost EVERYTHING. You should hear the military wives around here, "I haven't gotten an email or phone call from my husband in Afghanistan in THREE DAYS!" Hey lady! He's in a WAR! I remember MAIL (you know, the kind you write on a piece of paper, put it into a paper envelope, lick a stamp, put the paper stamp on the paper envelope, and put the envelope into a mail box) taking 7 - 10 days ONE WAY when I was in Viet Nam, the Middle East (78-79), the Indian Ocean (Diego Garcia), or the Mediterranean, and forget about mail during the winter in Antarctica (almost 7 months no mail).

People go spastic when their computer slows down.....or STOPS!

(USN retired 1965-85)

We were celebrating a wedding anniversary @ an upscale restaurant when the power went off..we had a little light as the table candles were all lit. We finished our meal and the waitress said the computers were down and she couldn't give us the bill..my husband said if she would bring him the menu so he could price what we had, he would figure it out..she said she didn't have a calculator..he said he didn't need one..so we paid our bill and left..unreal that she could not do simple math..Another time when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit, 1989, all the power went out in the hospital..the generators came on, but the patient rooms were dark..trying to get every one that could be discharged out of there was mind boggling, no elevators & little light, but we did it..we also triaged patients in the parking lot under battery powered lights.

Yes. It is sad that things don't have prices on them. Remember the checkout ladies that had to enter the prices into the registers? I don't ever remember them making a mistake. I am not sure many of todays checkers could run an adding machine or calculator and then figure tax. Sad time we are in. Technology is OK until it doesn't work.

Yes, In a grocery store. The register's didn't work, but the doors did.

No, but I was in an elevator (by myself) when the elevator stopped, the lights went out, and the emergency lighting kicked in.

I saw the "emergency phone" and thought .... ooooo, I always wanted to use one of those. Well, on Saturday, the office it connects to is closed, so I had to leave a message on their machine and hope the electricity came back on before Monday morning.

It did.

yep. It happened often after the Northridge quake in 1994 to 1995. The electricity kept being knocked out due to the aftershocks. That is when I started clipping little flashlights to my keys.

Walmart. An emergency generator or something got the lights back on, and I had no problem getting out.