When a power outage turns your store into a horror film
Halfway through my shift, the lights flicker, and then bo^m—total blackout. No emergency lights, no announcements, just darkness and dead silence. We stood in the breakroom with our phones as flashlights until someone finally got the generator running.
No registers, no scanners, and no customers willing to leave. People were wandering with carts like it was a haunted maze. One guy even asked if he could check out “manually.”
Eventually, power came back on, but every system had to be reset. Printers froze, handhelds desynced, and it took another hour just to figure out who clocked in or out.
I’ll never forget the look on the team lead’s face when the deli lights flicked back on like a horror movie jump scare.
Yup, ours didn’t even blink. Just kept shopping in the dark like it was normal.
They'll walk past a pitch-black aisle and still ask if there's any price drops.
Someone actually used their phone flashlight to keep looking for bread. I couldn’t make this up.
The worst is when they try to check out like we’re running off batteries.
Mine asked if we could just write the prices down on paper. Like it’s 1987.
The deli flickering back on might be the most accurate description I’ve read. It always feels creepy when lights return one section at a time.
Swear the meat slicer lit up like a villain reveal.
Same! Our cooler lights came back before anything else and it felt like a horror movie.
I was in frozen and one freezer lit up just enough to see someone staring at the glass. Nearly dropped my scanner.
Half the staff was hiding in receiving when ours happened. Looked like an apocalypse bunker.
Biggest headache is the timeclock and handhelds resetting. Took 15 minutes just to clock out last time.
Facts. My Zebra was stuck on the login screen for half my shift.
Takes longer to reboot than a Windows 98 PC.
And of course, that’s when leadership wants updates on freight progress.
Like… what progress? The store is offline. We're doing disaster recovery here.
Had a customer try to shoplift during our outage. Thought no lights = no cameras. Joke’s on them.
They always think they’re in an action movie.
Every outage we get a hero trying to “slip past.” Doesn’t work.
Same people who try to return items with no receipt 3 months later.
We really need an emergency plan for these. Not just “stand around with flashlights and wait.”
We improvised with those LED lanterns from aisle H7.
They told us to “stay calm” while the alarms beeped in the background nonstop.
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We had one go out during a Saturday rush. Customers just froze like NPCs in a video game.