Dear Customers,
A little over a month ago, back on the evening of March 6th and into the morning of the 7th, a heavy, wet snow fell across much of our area. At approximately 9:30pm, Monday night, our power flickered and then went out! While that’s a regular occurrence during the course of most years, it more often happens during a thunderstorm or sometimes, even a traffic accident. When it happens in the confines of the Borough, these outages are very quickly remedied, thanks to Charlie Jones and his crew.
Unfortunately, this particular outage fell under the purview of Pennelec occurring outside the town limits. For whatever reason, power wasn’t restored for some 12 hours! I know this because I was sitting at my desk at work when the power came back on, and I remember looking at the clock. It was exactly 9:38am on Tuesday morning.
There were years when such a lengthy power outage would have caused a huge problem. Our original generator that we installed when we moved here in 2003, was only big enough to handle a few emergency lights, the automatic doors and our cash registers. All the refrigerated and frozen cases were without power, so every time a customer opened the doors, we lost our cool, so to speak. A prolonged power outage would result in a full dumpster because once the temperature is compromised on perishable product, it’s unfit for sale.
Shortly after the Coudersport Costa’s Market closed, we reached an agreement with our cousins to purchase their mammoth “whole store” generator. They had purchased it several years before when the power in Coudersport was off for several days. That created an expensive loss and they didn’t want to suffer through that ever again, so Cousin Joe Costa found a generator powerful enough to run virtually everything; lights, refrigeration, heat – the works!
So Tuesday morning, when the rest of the town was dark and quiet, Costa’s Supermarket was open for business as usual. We actually had a customer who came in from out of town and remarked, “I didn’t know you guys were open!” I got to thinking, there were probably a lot of people in the area that weren’t aware that we had a generator that keeps us in business – even when nobody else is. It seemed like a good time to point that out!