Supermarket Survival

As some of you may know, the San Francisco Bay Area is experiencing a series of storms passing through, dropping more rain than usual for this area. It is not as bad as the national media is making it out to be, as this type of thing happens here about every ten years or so. Trees fall over, power goes out, and the same areas flood as last time. But to my point. On the day of New Year's eve, I stopped by a local supermarket (Safeway) to pick up a couple of things. One storm had just passed through, and another was due within 24 hours. As I approached the store, I noticed that it was dark inside, and a small group of people were just standing around outside. The "automatic" doors were propped open, so I walked inside. There was a Safeway employee at the door to greet me. He explained that they had lost power, and that the refrigerated dairy and frozen food cases would not be opened until power came back on. With those limitations, I was free to shop. Here is what I found:

Good for Safeway: This is a BIG store, and a few of the fluorescent light fixtures were on, obviously running on a battery backup. All of the computerized checkouts were fully functional, also obviously on a battery backup. The front of the store is all glass, so some natural light was getting in (it was mid-afternoon). Most of the employees had flashlights, and were assisting customers in the darker corners of the stores. All of the checkout stands were running, and had lines of a dozen or so.

Bad day for banking: This Safeway also has a Wells Fargo bank branch in it. One reason I stopped off at this particular store was to make a deposit. There sat two bank employees, reading magazines. When I approached, I was told that they were closed, due to no power. (Apparently, they don't believe in battery backup.) I asked if there was any way to make a deposit manually, and was told no. I asked if the branch across town had power. No, the local "computer center" lost power, so the nearest branch that could accept my deposit was about 25 miles north. I don't know why they could not simply take my checks and my deposit slip, hand write me a receipt, and "deposit" it when the computers came back up. I offered them the use of my pen as a manual backup device, but apparently they have "no procedures for a power failure", other than to turn away their customers.

My neighbors: So I venture into Safeway's isles. I notice that most of the shopping carts are filled with bottled water and canned goods. I overheard comments like: "The next storm is due tonight...we had better stock up now", "Hurry while we can still buy food", and my personal favorite, "What will we do if the power is out at out house?"

I left, for I did not want to wait in a long line of near panic buying for the couple of non-essential items that I stopped by for.

BTW, my house never lost power, but our uninterruptible power supplies did come on for about one second later that evening. I had tested our small backup generator the day BEFORE the first storm, and it started just fine. So I knew that we could keep the refrigerator/freezer going if there was a prolonged outage. I did not see the need to buy any additional water or canned food. We have plenty already at the house.

Nice post -- amazing how dependent we are on the things we take for granted, e.g., electricity.

Sounds like the bank tellers were catching up on their reading!

Most likely, they had no procedure in thier training for how to do things manually. If it isn't written down, it can't happen.

Remember, those bank employees are not paid enough to think independently. If they HAD accepted your deposit manually and in violation of policy, they probably would have been fired. They don't care about one individual account. They care deeply about sticking to the official rulebook so they can't be sued.

-- Craig

You are all correct. If I was a young, part-time, minimum wage bank teller, I probably would not do a lot of out-of-the-box thinking with other people's money.

Perhaps some of the computer experts can comment, but a UPS for power conditioning and backup seem so commonplace these days. I have four in my house (one on "my" computer, one on "her" computer, one on the backup server, and one on the Tivo (which is, after all, just a computer). No power problems, no worries, some run-time if needed, and plenty of time to do a controlled shut-down if the power outage will be long-term.

Well, they aren't paid minimum wage, in all likelyhood. Don't stiff the guys handling the cash, lest they loose some. <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> But it is too good a gig to risk loosing. I would have at least had the decency to hide, though.

As for APSes, I have them on all kinds of stuff. To nifty to not have, but their internal protocals might be to shutdown the computer after X minutes on the APS. Easy enough script to write, if the computer can talk to the APS.

Generally, it is, at least to a minimal degree. It is not too bad to get a UPS that can keep a computer going for 10 to 20 minutes. Getting something that can go for an hour costs a lot more. And the little bricks that you use for a single PC would be useless on a 19" rack of a dozen servers, so those use specialty (very expensive) UPS's. So, in the end, it all comes down to how much power your company is willing to pay for.

Plus, there is more to it than that. At my company, all Unix systems and all servers have backup power, so my computer can still run in the dark (for a little while). But none of the networking gear has any sort of backup, so a one-second power glitch will kill the routers. We use a Citrix server to get Windows applications on Uniix boxes. When the routers die, the connections get broken, and everything on the Windows side locks up. No fun.