Edinburgh business owners have told of the devastating impact of being forced to turn away customers due to repeated power outages.
Restaurants, pubs, and clothing stores have all been hit in the west end of the city with blackouts of electricity over the past few months. Disruption has left businesses losing out on thousands of pounds worth of trade during the cost of living crisis.
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Whighams wine bar, on Hope Street, has experienced six power outages in the last two months - most recently on March 18 when they were fully booked during the rugby.
Nicholas Henderson, started the business almost 40 years ago, he said: “It’s been nerve racking. The gas won’t work unless the extraction is working and it needs power. The chef can’t work, and you can’t even prepare anything in the kitchen, fridges all switch off as well.”
This has led to Nicholas having to call customers and tell them the unfortunate news their booking has been cancelled as the premises had no electricity.
Solo Menswear, on Stafford Street, has also been affected recently by problem. Three weeks ago they had to close on a Saturday for four hours.
Owner Peter Tritton, 56, said: “Nobody could come in and people tried, there was no lights so no one could see anything.”
Peter estimates he could have lost up to £1,000 during the outage. He went onto say: “It was very frustrating because people were coming and somebody tried to use their torch and they just couldn’t see it properly and had to leave.”
Duty Manager on shift of Vesta, on Queensferry Street, Declan Fleming described one of the outages as an “absolute nightmare.”
The bar and restaurant had to close for two hours on a Saturday almost a month ago and had to turn customers away from the eatery. Declan estimates the business lost between £900 to £1200.
He went onto say: “No business at all, you couldn’t use the till, you couldn’t use anything.”
“It’s extremely frustrating, we are losing out on money, losing out on peak custom and also ruining someone’s plans and day which isn’t our fault.”
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Damon Mitchell, 45, manager of the Scotland Shop, situated on Queensferry Street who sell Scottish fashion attire described the experience of a power outage as “irritating and confusing for customer.”
The shop experienced problems with their tills but fortunately the store have different ways of charging customers for products.
“It stopped our tills from working and I can still have our till system on my phone but it did affect the lighting in our shop.”
A spokesperson for SP Energy Networks said: “There was a fault on our low voltage network, which caused some interruption to customers in the west end. Engineering staff were dispatched to investigate the problem and restore customers as quickly as possible.
"We appreciate this can be frustrating, especially to the business community and we apologise for the disruption this has caused.”
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