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YOLO is a frozen yogurt shop in San Anselmo, a tiny town in Marin County.
It is decorated to feel something like a child’s birthday party. It has board games for families to play while they enjoy flavors like cake batter or a dairy-free mango sorbet. The after-school hours are the shop’s busiest time because it’s down the street from an elementary school.
YOLO has four fro-yo machines. Their names are Jackson, Kyra, Luke and Zoe.
Over the past several days, though, Jackson, Kyra, Luke and Zoe have been out of commission, because Pacific Gas & Electric — the utility that YOLO’s owner, Daphne Moore, typically pays between $700 and $800 a month — cut power to a huge swath of California, including Marin County.
“It’s all still a bit of a fog,” Ms. Moore told me.
The shop had been closed since Saturday, and even though power was restored by Tuesday evening, she was worried about having enough inventory to reopen.
[Read the latest updates on the fires and blackouts here.]
I talked with Ms. Moore on Wednesday afternoon, as firefighters got closer to controlling the massive Kincade fire in Sonoma County. While officials allowed most of the people who fled the blaze to head home, thousands of people in the region were still without power.
In Southern California, another fast-spreading fire, the Easy fire, exploded in Simi Valley, threatening homes and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. And dangerous winds were still in the forecast.
Amid everything, Californians were just beginning to take stock of the financial toll of the blackouts — which, as PG&E’s executives have said, could be necessary for a long time in the future.
Ms. Moore, a former lawyer and musician who bought the yogurt shop this year, emphasized that she was fortunate to have avoided damage from the fires. Her family is safe.
Still, she said that if unpredictable power outages continue, she may have trouble keeping the shop afloat.
“I will survive the year,” she said, “but this could wipe out everything we’ve earned so far.”
Ms. Moore said that in a good month, when the weather is warm and school is in session, she hopes to take in $20,000. Rent for her window-walled storefront in downtown San Anselmo is $2,600. And the bulk of the other expenses are utilities.
The yogurt and toppings themselves aren’t a major cost — although it stung to lose roughly $1,000 of inventory when the refrigerator stopped working and she had to dispose of 120 containers of yogurt. (Ms. Moore couldn’t get ahold of a generator in time.)
Mostly, though, Ms. Moore said her profits come from volume. And better months of sales help carry her through the times when people don’t eat as much frozen yogurt. So the more than $4,000 she estimated she lost during the forced closing is painful.
And she’s worried more blackouts could be coming.
It remains to be seen how widespread power outages will affect California’s economy in the longer term.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that economists predicted that the broad round of power shut-offs earlier this month could have an impact of as much as $1 billion.
A Moody’s Analytics report estimated that the lost economic output was closer to $500 million — which a Moody’s report said would most likely “pale in comparison” to the possible damage of a destructive wildfire and California’s overall G.D.P., which is $3.1 billion.
Nevertheless, experts say that small businesses are critical drivers of local economies and that they struggle mightily in the wake of natural disasters.
For YOLO, the power shut-offs pose a similar threat.
“Our utility expects small businesses that depend on refrigeration to take maybe up to $10,000 hits every year?” Ms. Moore said. “I can’t really fathom that this can be the new normal.”
Also: If you own a small business, tell us how the power outages are affecting your work. Were you able to continue operating without power? Will you factor in extra costs for next year? Email us at CAtoday@nytimes.com.
Here’s what else we’re following
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Senator Kamala Harris laid off staff members and redeployed others to Iowa in the most significant reboot yet of a once top-tier Democratic presidential campaign. [The New York Times]
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Representative Katie Hill’s estranged husband, Kenny Heslep, told his parents he had been hacked not long before nude photos of her were posted online. But a local podcast host said he was “clearly shopping this around and saving stuff to make people look bad,” before the conservative website Redstate published accusations of sexual impropriety against Ms. Hill, who said she would resign. [Buzzfeed]
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Three men were killed and at least nine others were injured in a shooting at a Halloween party in Long Beach late on Tuesday night. The authorities said the motive was unclear and as of Wednesday afternoon, the gunman was still at large. [The New York Times]
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Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, said on Wednesday that the company would ban political ads. That stands in stark contrast to Facebook, which has been harshly criticized for allowing politicians to run false claims in their ads on that social network. [The New York Times]
That news came the same day that Facebook, Lyft and Apple reported their quarterly earnings. (Facebook reported a 29 percent revenue jump — a bright spot for a giant embroiled in scandal.)
Notable and quotable
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“When we celebrate Día de Muertos, we celebrate the resilience of our pre-Hispanic traditions and people.” [L.A. Taco]
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Hasan Minhaj, the comedian and host of the Netflix show “Patriot Act,” describes his hometown, Davis, as “the punching bag of the state — everyone thinks everything north of the Bay Area is just fields and sadness.” [Vanity Fair]
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“They are more like California’s other problems, like housing affordability and homelessness and traffic — human-made catastrophes we’ve all chosen to ignore, connected to the larger dysfunction at the heart of our state’s rot: a failure to live sustainably.” Is California as we know it over? [New York Times Opinion]
And Finally …
If you were a Southern California adolescent at any point in the last 30 or so years, odds are that the Red Hot Chili Peppers have been the soundtrack to some of your emotional moments.
(This is a safe space for you to admit that you have unironically belted “My Friends,” at least once.)
In any case, Flea, the band’s rarely shirted bassist, has a new memoir out about his wild life before R.H.C.P. The book is called, “Acid for the Children,” and he sat down with The Times at home in Pasadena to talk about it. You can read about what happened here.
In the meantime, I’m adding “Under the Bridge” to our California playlist. It features a classic bass line, and it’s also a durable portrait of Los Angeles as a kind of partner in solitude and melancholy — always there, never judging.
Listen to the California Soundtrack on Spotify.
California Today goes live at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com. Were you forwarded this email? Sign up for California Today here.
Jill Cowan grew up in Orange County, graduated from U.C. Berkeley and has reported all over the state, including the Bay Area, Bakersfield and Los Angeles — but she always wants to see more. Follow along here or on Twitter, @jillcowan.
California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.
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