Instead of the usual display of gorgeous jewelry in the window at C.B. Stark on Main street, Vineyard Haven, last Friday customers were greeted with plywood shutters that read “Dear Earl, please be a pearl and go away. Love, C.B. Stark.” Inside the store, similar messages for Hurricane Bob, Gloria and Hugo could be seen on the reverse side of the panel. Boarding up for hurricanes was nothing new for Ms. Stark, but being asked to close in the middle of the day on a holiday weekend was another story.

“Yesterday they told us that we would have to close at 2 p.m.,” she said on Friday. “And we’re all seeing there’s nothing going on and we’ve all been notified that nothing’s really coming until the middle of the night. It’s not even blowing or raining; why do we have to close? We’re dependent upon this business.

“I’m very upset and no one’s come around to tell us anything. Who knows? We need to have the business and we have people who want to buy things. When they said 2 p.m. yesterday I had my plywood put up because I didn’t want to deal with it this morning. Now it really looks like I’m closed,” she added. “We would do a lot more business.”

Mocha Mott’s owner Tim Dobel stopped in to talk to Ms. Stark to express his concerns about closing early as well. “Make your contingencies, I’m fine with that. If it was going to be a bad hurricane, fine, no one cares. But now it looks like it’s not going to be much,” he said. Mr. Dobel said he asked a police officer in Oak Bluffs if he would be arrested if he stayed open past 2 p.m., and was told yes. In Vineyard Haven, he said it was the same story.

“Now they’re saying apparently, we’d like you to close. It’s confusing information for one thing,” Mr. Dobel said. “And I just wish they would wait to close us down before they knew what was really going on. They can preposition all their stuff, I don’t have any trouble with that. It’s not supposed to hit until midnight, so close us at 8 p.m. if that’s what you think we need to do.

“It’s over the top.”

But Tisbury emergency response director Richard Townes had a different view. He said after a Thursday briefing with state and local officials, all indications were that the Island would be experiencing gale winds by noon on Friday. “Then the storm veered off, thank God,” Mr. Townes said later. “With the information we had at the time, we did fairly well. We asked businesses to close, we didn’t order businesses to close.”

Mr. Townes agreed that the reverse-911 system needs some fine tuning. “When we changed the driving advisory . . . we should have met first and changed it at the same time. If we’re going to change any advisories, we need to do it as a group,” he said.

Complaints were widespread among Island business owners about the early closure and poor communication. “It was too early,” said Richard Giordano, owner of Giordano’s in Oak Bluffs. “I had a lady and two children who wanted to get something at 2 p.m. . . . I gave her a couple slices of pizza and a cup of chowder to feed her kids, yet there’s a bar open until 5 p.m. and Balance is open until 8 at night. The police did nothing about it. You can’t feed people but you can get them drunk? I’m livid,” he added.

As the sun came out Saturday morning, Mr. Giordano said there was little question that his business had been affected. “The people who run this town should have common sense. I have common sense; if it’s blowing and there’s a hurricane I’ll close, but there’s nothing going on . . . It killed yesterday completely.”