Because of the weather. Just when I felt I was lucky last night (this morning) my condo did not lose power this time, oops, the storm hit us. So next time I should not feel too good about it. Some of the Panera Bread stores also lost power, e.g., the one at Old Olive (where I usually go) and the New Ballas store, finally I set down at the Olive and Woodsmill store. You can imagine this is a very crowd place. Because I am not the only unlucky person.
Interestingly, at Panera I noticed there are three young kids wearing Crocs. I remember the article at fool.com in which the author tried to count the Crocs and Heelys at Disney World in Orlando: an informal way to gauge the popularity of those products.
While power outage bring inconveniene to ordinary people, how will it affect the business? Obviously not good for retailers, restaurants and hotels, because they lose business on this. Some grocery store has backup generator (Schnucks) but they can not generate enough power for the freezers. I can only think of one business currently benefit from this: the tree and limb services companies. They are probablly the busiest people besisdes Ameren UE people.