I have one situation that I'll never forget. About 5 years ago my wife and I were shopping at Target. The power went out completely and with no skylights, the store was literally pitch black 150' from the front doors and beyond. We were shocked to find that none of the staff were prepared for this in the slightest and customers were left fumbling on their own for at least 5 minutes. Several folks who either didn't have a flashlight or phone (or didn't think to use them for light) were rendered completely immobile by the darkness. We used our mobile phones to navigate to the flashlight aisle. I didn't have an EDC flashlight at this point, but I certainly had my knife. We hacked open about 6 flashlight packages, installed batteries and walked around passing them out to nearby customers.
There was zero verbal communication from the store's staff to the customers and the store was eerily quiet. We considered that they were maybe being robbed at the front, or some other bizarre occurrence. Nope, just a power outage. Shockingly, rather than sending employees around with flashlights to help people and guide them out of the store (and heck, maybe avoid some lawsuits in the process), quite literally all of the store's staff, as far as I could tell, were stationed at the front of the store, where there was daylight coming in from the doors. Why? They were all visually ensuring that no one left the premises with merchandise! No safety concerns, no discussion of finding any potentially lingering lost customers, nothing. We dropped the flashlights on the counter (with a clatter) in disgust and left.
Nowadays, I figure I can light up several aisles around me with one light to the point that people can at least see where they're going. :thumbsup: