CITY OF LAKE GENEVA — As expected, downtown Lake Geneva was overflowing with people on the Fourth of July.
Tourists flocked to Main Street. Open parking spots were few and far between, and people clogged sidewalk corners waiting for crosswalk signals.
It looked like it was business as usual for the lakeside town on one of its busiest days of the year.
In reality, for shops and restaurants, it was anything but.
Only 24 hours after a deadly storm swept through the lake, killing three children and prompting a state of emergency declaration from the city, its effects were being felt by many of the local mom-and-pop shops.
Some had signs hanging in the window alerting customers they were without internet, which meant no wifi. Others said they were cash-only as they worked to get their credit card machines running again.
One bar had an advertisement outside the front door that read, “We’re OPEN, fully operational,” a sign that the bare minimum on most days had become a selling point after the chaos.
Olympic Family Restaurant, at 748 W. Main St., lost internet around 1:30 p.m. July 3, one hour after the storm. When the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel arrived around 2:30 p.m. July 4 – 25 hours later – the manager was on the phone with their provider, still trying to get it back.
No internet meant no credit card machines. Even though the building had power, the ATM machine was not working.
“We lost a lot of business today,” said Yolanda Guerrero, a server at Olympic, estimating she had to turn 100 customers away over the past two days.
She estimated at least $2,000 in lost business. To make matters worse, it still would be another day before they had internet service.
Just down Main Street, Lake-Aire Restaurant has been nearly 24 hours without internet service. It finally returned around 11:30 a.m. July 4, and the restaurant was packed a few hours later.
When servers could not charge credit cards, the manager took a risk by storing customers’ credit card information and waiting for the machine to come back online.
If the gamble failed, they would have lost thousands of dollars. But when the manager, Renee Argiropoulos, ran everyone’s information Saturday morning, only one receipt amounting to $50 failed after the card declined.
“‘Let’s hope this turns out okay,'” Argiropoulos remembered thinking after making that decision. “Thank God it did.”
Other businesses were less affected by the storm.
Geneva Tap House did the same thing as Lake-Aire, having customers pay and sign their receipts so they could run the card information when internet came back. They had around 100 receipts saved, all of which went through.
The Porch, a local cafe, didn’t have their credit card machine active until mid-afternoon July 4. But many of their customers carried cash, so it wasn’t a huge problem.
Speedo’s Harborside Pub & Grill, which sits next to the Riviera — prime real estate because of the amount foot traffic — saw its outdoor seating flying away in the wind during the storm, but workers were able to recover all of it.
When the weather was at its worst on July 3, they had about 30 to 40 people in the basement during the storm, said the pub’s owner, Spyro Condos.
While he had power at his restaurant, the same could not be said for his house. Not that he would have it the other way around – that would have hurt business on one of his busiest weekends of the year.
“Didn’t lose it here,” Condos said, “which is more important.”
Jack Albright can be reached at JAlbright@usatodayco.com.