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GENERATING SALES
Photo
Bill Clark, manager of Bernard-Daniels Lumber and Hardware in Canfield wheels a diesel generator from the business, while a gas-powered generator sits on the floor. The company had put its generators on eBay Sunday night and sold several to people affected by the outages in central Ohio.
and Jamison Cocklin
YOUNGSTOWN
Local stores had a run on generators over the weekend after a storm knocked out power to much of central and eastern Ohio.
Lowe’s and Home Depot locations throughout the Mahoning Valley had their shelves cleared over the weekend.
Even smaller stores were selling more generators than normal. Bill Clark, manager at Bernard-Daniels Lumber and Hardware in Canfield, said his company typically sells about a generator a month, but sold six or seven over the weekend.
“We had a lot of people ordering them from other areas. We’ve still got one that has been sold that somebody is going to pick up,” he said.
Dan Wilson, of Granville, said he drove nearly three hours to Bernand-Daniels to pick up the generator that will power his home for the next week.
“I found the store by doing a search on eBay for all generators within 150 miles. I sent an email and Eric [a store employee] responded within about five minutes,” Wilson said.
This is the fifth power outage of multiple days Wilson has experienced since building his home in 2006, he said.
“I had a hook up installed when I built the house in 2006 and then I just never pulled the trigger [on buying one],” Wilson said.
All four of the area Home Depot stores were hit hard over the weekend, said Buddy Colley, store manager at the Boardman Home Depot. The Boardman store alone sold 20 generators on Saturday and Sunday.
“People were being smart; they were calling from Columbus to see if we had them. Then they were paying for them with a credit card over the phone and driving up here to pick them up,” he said. “We even sold the displays. We have nothing left. We sold the last one at about 11 a.m. Sunday.”
There were also a lot of people who came into the store who were in the area visiting family and purchased generators — knowing their homes did not have power, Colley said.
“It was amazing some of the stories that people were telling us,” he said.
Home Depot is currently working to restock its stores, but will start in the Columbus area, Colley said. The Columbus stores are supposed to get restocked on Monday, but it was not known when the local store would receive new generators.
Brian Heckert, store manager at the Boardman Lowe’s, said generators were “flying” out of the store.
Many of those coming to the store to buy generators were from the Columbus area, he said. It was estimated the store sold 30 generators over the weekend.
“This happens during major power outages. When rain knocked the power out on the east coast, we had people driving here to buy generators. That was the furthest we’ve ever had people travel,” Heckert said.
At the Niles Home Depot, Kevin Schofield, a supervisor in the lumber and building materials department, said generators sold so fast over the weekend that his stores couldn’t meet the requests from other Home Depots closer to the areas hit hardest.
Cheri DePillo, a hardware supervisor at the same store, said that all the generators in stock, around 20, were sold out by the end of her shift at 6 p.m. on Saturday.
“We probably won’t have any in stock for a few months,” she said. “I expect a memo telling me that whatever orders are being placed will go to communities hit the worst.”
DePillo said customers were coming from as far away as West Virginia and Columbus to secure generators for a week that will see temperatures exceed 90 degrees in some parts of the region.
At the Sears in Austintown, sales associate Dustin Kramer said that demand for generators was so high over the weekend that employees there were forced to sell two floor models.
As a result of the 15 or so calls Sears had received about generators, Kramer said other sales associates from his store were sent on an unsuccessful errand to Canton, where they were beaten to additional stock at a supply house.
Generators, which vary in wattage, typically sell for between $300 and $1,500, said Dave Touchan, an assistant store manager at the Lowe’s in Warren.
He said his store had not only received a barrage of calls for the products over the weekend, but that other stores closer to the outages had requested his remaining stock.
As of Monday, Touchan said the store had sold out and he didn’t know when the store would restock.
“We’ve had a combination of customers,” he said. “A lot of local people came in to purchase them for their relatives who are without power.”
The Sam’s Club in Boardman had exhausted its stock of generators by Monday through people purchasing them online, according to a company spokeswoman.
Do-Cut in Boardman was one of the few local stores to have any generators in stock. The company sells Honda Generators.
In Ohio alone, an estimated 1 million customers were said to have lost power on Friday, with more than 400,000 remaining in the dark as of Monday afternoon.
Portions of West Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania were also affected by high winds and thunderstorms over the weekend.
Mark Durbin, a spokesman for FirstEnergy, said a number of Ohio Edison utility crews from the Youngstown area had been dispatched to assist fellow crews in the battered regions of West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
“This is common,” he said. “We use the term mutual assistance when we have to shift resources around. It’s the advantage of operating a large utility — you can deploy additional resources where they are needed.”
Though Durbin did not have an exact figure for the amount of additional manpower dispatched, he said FirstEnergy operates 10 utility companies in five states. Crews from Youngstown were also in Marion and Springfield, assisting other Ohio Edison workers in their efforts to restore power.
Currently, Durbin said FirstEnergy is not assisting other beleaguered Ohio utilities like American Electric Power and Duke, instead he said the company is focused on “restoring power for our customers.”