Melting ice-cream that has to be thrown out, customers unable to swipe bank cards, the risk of unfinished tattoos, damage to equipment, and the loss of custom and tens of thousands of rand in sales – Eskom’s fresh round of load-shedding is having a debilitating impact on Bay businesses.
Companies said on Tuesday they were struggling to survive the rolling blackouts and often inaccurate load-shedding schedules while incurring considerable short- and long-term losses.

Tony Kruger, co-owner of il Gelato in Newton Park, said its handmade, additive-free icecream was particularly susceptible to power outages.
“We can survive a two-hour outage but, after four hours, it starts to melt and then we have to chuck it,” he said.
Besides damaging the product, the power fluctuations were also continually blowing fuses on the compressors.
“It’s costing us a fortune and we can’t get insurance because our business is deemed high risk by the insurers,” he said.
The company, which employs nine people, lost about R20,000 because of intermittent outages in 2018 – and 2019 had not begun well, he said.
By the time Eskom’s first-ever stage four load-shedding outage hit on Monday, however, it had managed to save most of the stock by trucking it to a buyer in Jeffreys Bay.
“We have thought about a generator but that will set us back R180,000, which we can’t afford, so it’s just a matter of managing the situation as best we can,” Kruger said.
Jongo Mahala, owner of Morro Pizza up the road from il Gelato, said it had lost thousands of rand during Monday’s outage.
The pizzeria is geared around “African-flavoured pizzas”, produced with spices from Mahala’s birthplace of Morogoro in Tanzania, and they often get mass orders from big companies. “But when people want their food and you cannot provide, then you lose that custom,” he said...