UPDATED: Power Still Out For Most of Chesapeake Square Shopping Center

UPDATED: As of 7 p.m. Monday most stores in Chesapeake Square shopping center still were without power.

In addition to , Auto Zone also was open. Best Buy and ShopRite remained closed, though employees allowed customers into the grocery store to access the pharmacy.

Across the street, electricity seemed scattered with some stores at the Centre at Glen Burnie appearing open while others were closed. In the mall lot, Pappa's and Chick-fil-A both were closed.

Original article: Power went out at stores in the Chesapeake Square shopping center in the 6700 block of Ritchie Highway after Hurricane Irene passed through Glen Burnie late Saturday night.

Bill Collins, a member of management at , said they are doing their best to preserve food at the supermarket and are anxiously waiting for power to be restored so they can open the store. Employees stood outside to turn the steady stream of customers away, letting them know the store was without power.

"All I need is somebody to push the button and we're ready to roll," Collins said.

He said the store closed early at 9:30 p.m. Saturday and power went out around 11 p.m. The store generally closes at midnight and would have opened at 7 a.m. if they had power, but as of 11 a.m. the supermarket still was in the dark.

"We prepared by having ... cold trucks to keep the food from going bad," he said, adding that they moved perishable cold foods to the trucks to keep them at the proper temperatures," he said. "For our cold cases, we have dry ice to go with our backup generators."

Collins said they were in a wait-and-see situation, calling all of the emergency hotlines to let power companies know they were without, and couldn't wait to reopen.

Collins said the store's mission is to be there for its customers in times like these, so it was especially hard for him to close the store.

"In all the years we've been open in all four stores, we've never closed the store other than on Christmas," he said. "We provide an important service to the community ... And I think you could see the amount of dedication [to the mission] in our workforce. Almost everyone showed up here today ready to go."

Collins said they had a skeleton crew ready and other employees home were on-call to return when the store reopened. But he said he was encouraged by the dedication he saw from employees.

"We're still so new. A lot of times you don't know how things are until you've been through something [as a team]. This experience here will be bonding," he said. "Thankfully the store is in good shape and no one was hurt."

In the same boat as ShopRite, Best Buy employees were standing outside the store turning customers away. Customers were urged to go to the Arundel Mills location, where there still was power.

The lone store with partial power was , whose lottery machines and registers were still up and running.

As of about noon, more than 111,000 Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE) customers in Anne Arundel County were without power, though more than 24,000 had power restored, according to the BGE website.