Thousands of pounds worth of trade was lost yesterday as a host of shops in the north’s biggest retail park suffered a lengthy power cut.
At its worst point, 14 stores at Inverness Shopping Park were affected by the outage yesterday afternoon for more than three hours.
SSE were still investigating the cause of the problem last night, but a team of engineers had managed to get all shops back on grid by about 4pm using an industrial size generator.
Tesco, Vue cinema, DW Sports, Burger King, Pizza Hut and Homebase were unaffected by the power cut.
SSE spokesman Duncan MacDonald said: “Some things are apparent straight away but with this, nothing immediately shows what caused it – but the priority is always getting the electricity back on for customers.
“We would like to apologise for any inconvenience this has caused”.
Yesterday at the shopping park several disgruntled and frustrated customers could be seen walking up to shop entrances only to be told they could not come in during the outage.
Most customers returned to their cars and left.
Others tried waiting with their car doors open, on what was the hottest day of the year, while others managed to secure seats outside the Costa cafe.
And one frustrated customer, Richard Watson, had travelled from Forres yesterday morning to buy a metal detector from Maplin, only to discover it wasn’t working when he returned home.
The 70-year-old arrived back at the store at 2pm seeking a replacement, but was told he would have to wait until the power came back on.
Mr Watson, of 50 Randolph Lane, said: “I am not happy about it. I asked the guys at the door if they could just swap it, but they said they could not do that. They said the hydro guys told them the power would be back on by about 4pm.
“It’s annoying coming all the way from Forres to buy a metal detector which was not working, then having to come back to be told the power is out”.