Local merchants work around Rogers outage

While last week’s Rogers outage received plenty of attention, the power interruption a week earlier was actually a bigger problem for local businesses.

BIA President Laurie Severn, owner of Heirloom 142 and Lagom, says that her stores rely heavily on cloud based point of sale systems and online processing of debit and credit card payments. But she adds, “After two years of pandemic we’re pretty skilled at quickly adapting to any situation.”

They used their Bell network mobile phones to create hotspots and carried on. Severn says full functionality was not restored until Sunday which was challenging during a very busy weekend but that customers were very patient.

On June 29, a single vehicle accident near Stayner left thousands of Creemore area homes and businesses without power for most of the day forcing most businesses to actually close their doors.