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Comment by dfxm12 | Hacker News Reader

Certainly grocery stores don't need to ask someone else if their freezers are getting power, no? They would have monitors, people and computers, that are doing this job.

Additionally, even as a residential customer, my utility reaches out to me when they suspect there's an outage...

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Think more about centralized ops. Any individual store will of course notice their power has gone out.

But what do they do then? Call around to every nearby store asking if they still have power, and have space in cold storage? While those stores may well be calling yet other stores?

How does that work when there are 6 affected stores and 12 nearby ones that still have power? Maybe 3 of those have lots of cold storage, and another 4 have some but not lots free.

A centralized view could easily be worth $1k/month.

(and you are very fortunate if your utility reaches out to you in mass outages (>1000 customers), and especially if they do it via API your systems can act on)

I mean, your stores certainly must be pinging back HQ. If they stop pinging, something is up. Gotta determine if it is power or connectivity.

But the ISP case definitely is a valid case for 1k/month.

> Think more about centralized ops. Any individual store will of course notice their power has gone out.

And those individual stores report to centralized ops. This is a terrible usecase

How do those stores report to HQ when they don't have power? Even cell towers could be down if the situation is bad enough.

The lack of a signal/data gets investigated, upon which you find out the store has no power.

And that's _much_ more expensive than 1k/month. At least if you keep the ability to investigate effectively around all the time.

No it’s not. This isn’t a developing country.

A grocery chain will see maybe one outage in 10 years that is bad enough to take out the store and internet+cell phone networks.

Dispatching someone is absolutely more cost effective for these rare occasions.

A backup battery. If you’re worried about cell phone outages, use Starlink.

I’ve never worked in grocery but from my experience in other pre-internet industries I can easily imagine a politically marginalized CTO who would rather spend $1k on a turnkey solution than herd 100 cats who can’t reliably format a spreadsheet of data.

That turnkey solution is powered by similar cats. But at least there’s a contract to club them over the head with.

Last year, we had a major wind event that caused significant loss of power in the area. My local store pulled in multiple trucks dropping off their freezer trailers. The logistics of getting those took some time and spoilage was definitely an issue. There was no saving the produce, but the frozen items were saved.

I could see a "smart" corporate operation that detects the outages and starts to enact plans to tentatively start moving equipment around depending on predicted outage duration. Then again, I could also see where that would be deemed too expensive to do, and this is just a tech fantasy.

I’ve noticed the smaller the store/chain the more likely they are to try to save the food (and if you lose power because of a freezing storm that can be relatively easy). The larger Walmarts just go to generator or immediately give up.

They don't have backup generators? Ever grocery store bigger than a radioshack ive ever been to has backup generators specifically because the potential for losses is so damn high, not to mention all the extra work that has to be paid out to move all those goods twice only to still be risking spoilage. Even the little off-brand grocer serving a town 900 nearby has backup generators, and they are right on a main power supply line so basically have zero outages because it is top priority.

Your experience is unusual. Generators are expensive and require maintenance, and many stores (even larger chains) don’t have them. And, as anyone who’s worked with or in a data enter knows, sometimes they don’t work when needed.

Many grocery stores rely on short notice rental of refrigerated semi trailers rather than the ongoing maintenance / testing of generators.

Very few places actually have generators with the capacity to run everything. The specific store had just enough power to run limited lighting and the registers.

People always think generators are an easy solution, but that tends to be the response from people that have not actually looked into what generator solutions look like

Is there not a possibility that if a neighbouring area has gone down, then your area might be at risk of going down if they need to do maintenace on all surrounding areas to fix the issue? I would imagine its useful for store owners to know the power is out a mile down the road, and might enable them to start making preparations in case they are next.

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