Maresco's Italian Market is open seven days a week. But Sunday's snowstorm forced this store to close shop at the beginning of a new week.
"How do you prepare for a snowstorm in October?" owner Ethel Fesko said. "None of us were expecting it to come so quickly."
Fesko is one of the many Omaha business owners who expect a lot of their business to come in on weekends when customers are off work.
"Losing product is problematic, but even more problematic is being closed during business hours when you have customers coming in the weekend. that's when people are running their errands and shopping," Fesko said. "We lost a lot of business that we could have had yesterday."
Her market in Rockbrook Village that imports food from Italy lost power around noon Sunday and was out for the rest of the day. Items like sausages, soups and salads had to be thrown away.
"We did what we could. we put away the sausages cheeses and products that were really perishable into our refrigerators and coolers and tried to keep them shut so we wouldn't lose any product," Fesko said.
But with the loss of Sunday's business, Fesko hopes to make up for the lost day this week.
"It's costly and it's frustrating," Fesko said. "I'm hoping those customers will come back and realize it was out of our control."
The Douglas County Health Department says it's best to throw out food left unrefrigerated for more than two hours.
