‘This is the most absurd thing:’ Local business in The Centre Mall reacts to Rogers outage

A major power outage from Rogers left many shoppers and businesses hung out to dry on Friday.

Due to the outage, debit transactions and ATM machines were down for most of the day, not to mention cell service and the ability to use the internet.

Arif Ratnani is the store manager at Jewels inside Centre Mall in Saskatoon.

Ratnani says he’s seen small hiccups in the past with the machines, but nothing like what transpired on Friday.

“This was the first time. There are some glitches sometimes, but it just comes back on maybe in an hour or two,” Ratnani explained.

“This is the most absurd thing we’ve ever seen.”

Since most people have moved on from carrying cash around in their wallets, Ratnani says their business took a hit.

“It’s difficult because we lost a few sales. The MasterCard and Visa cards were working, only the Interac was not working,” Ratnani said.

Ratnani said a good chunk of people don’t have a credit card on them and would prefer to pay using debit, which ultimately hurt them.

Even if they wanted to take out cash, the ATM machines wouldn’t allow for it.

The whole situation resulted in having to deal with angry customers.

Ratnani said that part was tough to deal with in certain situations, but it was completely out of their control.

“There’s no choice. What can you do about it? The whole server is down, nobody can do anything (and) that’s the way it is.”

Thankfully, things resumed back to normal on Saturday and everything was running smoothly again.

Ratnani hopes they won’t have to deal with something like this ever again.