As a fellow biz owner, I get it and that's the call you have to make. Short term pain to keep customers (and sometimes employees) happy is almost always worth it in the long run. Within some level of reason, of course. You probably did, but I would double check and make sure there wasn't some sort of miscommunication that can be fixed. Sometimes there's no way to avoid these sort of situations, but I always try to make sure there wasn't something myself or my staff could have done better.

Pretty good agreement with other models. Lots of juice between Christmas and new years.

Yeah, social media has definitely changed the dynamic and unfortunately has enabled and empowered some of the worst customer behaviors. This is true across the whole service industry. And especially in your line of work where it's extremely word of mouth driven, you really have to be proactive with things like that. It's a cost of doing business, and you just have to hope that the positives with the free advertising that social media can provide will outweigh those negatives.

Power's out!

Now if only it was 10-15 degrees colder. We've seen this so many times, freezing rain at Crown Point, regular old rain in Sandy etc.