Pecantown Books & Brews shares impact
(Seguin) — Texans across the state found themselves in the dark ages as Spectrum Internet suffered a massive outage Tuesday afternoon. In Seguin, residents and local businesses were forced to figure out how to continue normal operations without internet connectivity.
One business impacted by the event was Pecantown Books & Brews. Owner Tess Coody-Anders explains.
“Our point of sale provider allows us to take payments off-line,” she said. “There are lots of uncertainties with it and no guarantee that those payments will actually be processed when we’re back online, but we have a fighting shot at it. So, we ran credit cards as usual, and we’re hoping for the best. Fortunately, our customers were very understanding and tried to use cash instead, whenever they could.”
However, this is not a foolproof solution and has left Coody-Anders and Pecantown with a day of low sales.
“Whether it’s the Internet, being out or our point of sale application being down, it’s highly disruptive,” Coody-Anders said. “Firstly, we have no guarantee that any of the transactions we post es today will actually be processed. If not, we gave away a lot of food and books today! There is a very real likelihood that we will not be able to capture any of those transactions we processed today, which will mean a significant loss. What’s more, we ended up having to close early because things were just too chaotic and slow. So, we’ve lost sales For the remainder of the day. And most importantly, we weren’t there for our customers the way we’d like to be.”
Coody-Anders says the economic impact of such an outage expands well beyond her business, with businesses across the community experiencing similar operational problems.
“The implications for an individual small business can be dramatic,” Coody-Anders said. “Most are operating with little cash flow, and can’t afford a full days losses. When you add up the impact to small businesses across the state, the economic impact is staggering: lost income, employees losing wages if businesses have to close early, lost inventory. It’s a mess!”
With no clear answers as to the outage’s cause, Spectrum customers will have to wait to see what reason the company provides as local businesses figure out how to recover lost costs due to the internet failure.