Outage comes at bad time for cafe
THE owner of a popular cafe in Outram says she will have to turn customers away during a peak time of day and lose threequarters of her revenue due to a planned Aurora Energy outage.
The Wobbly Goat Cafe, along with the Outram Garage in the rural town, will be without power between 11am and 1pm this Friday while Aurora crews carry out pole replacements on the network.
The cafe’s owner Sarah Moore said she was told by Aurora when the network outage would happen by email and her pleas for a different time to be considered went unheeded.
‘‘To choose that time and to not be able to get anywhere . . . is just frustrating,’’ she said.
‘‘That’s when we are really going for it, between 11am and 2pm. It’s basically threequarters of what I make in my day is in that period.’’
She has been agonising over how to deal with not having power at that time, considering closing for the whole day.
But that was a worstcase scenario for her, she said, not wanting to let her customers down.
Many of those customers were cyclists, runners or hikers stopping on their journey for refreshment. Mrs Moore said she was worried some people might not know the cafe would be closed during those hours and be left disappointed when they turned up.
‘‘I’m here to service the locals and the clientele I’ve built over three or four years. I don’t want to do that [close all day].’’
She also had an obligation to keep her staff on for the full day, she said.
When she spoke to Aurora representatives, Mrs Moore said she was told to install a generator to keep the cafe running during the outage.
‘‘I don’t know they have full knowledge of really what’s involved when they say just go and get a generator.
‘‘You just don’t get one and plug it into the power socket.’’
In June retired Delta engineer Steve Tilleyshort told the Otago Daily Times the cost for a cafe to get a 14kilovoltampere generator could be about $11,000.
An Aurora spokeswoman said the lines company had had talks with Mrs Moore about the planned outage.
‘‘Where possible, we try to schedule work to minimise the impact on affected customers,’’ she said.
But she said the two parties were not able to reach agreement on a different time and the nature of the work meant it had to go ahead because it was part of a series of jobs that needed to be completed together.
‘‘We spoke with Sarah [the cafe owner] on a number of occasions over the phone to try to come to a positive solution,’’ she said.
‘‘We are committed to providing a positive experience for our customers and always encourage customer feedback.’’
Outram Garage owner Dean Warnock said his business would be affected by the outage but he was not concerned by it.
He said he was happy with the communication he had with Aurora and expected the outage to be shorter than the two hours the lines company had suggested.