Just before the department store was scheduled to open at 9 a.m. the power went out, darkening all the stores in the Shenango Valley Mall in Hermitage, said Randy Coleman, area manager for Pennsylvania Power Co.

The cause of the outage was a bad wire leading from a Penn Power transformer to the JCPenney store, Coleman said. He said the wire was most likely damaged during installation and moisture worsened the problem over time.

Power was expected to be restored before noon today, Coleman said.

In the meantime, the National City Bank branch was closed and its automated teller machine was not working, branch manager Mark Malcolmson said. "I don’t know when or if we’ll be open today," he said.

Despite the outage and no working registers, Kaufmann’s opened at 9 a.m. -- an hour earlier than usual -- for its customer appreciation day, said Lesley Ruhnau, store manager.

Backup generators provided dim lighting for several Kaufmann’s customers who chose to shop, and Ms. Ruhnau hoped another generator could get at least one register running before power was restored.

One woman left the store, saying she’d return when there was enough light to tell the difference between the colors of sweaters.