By Colter Hettich, Features Editor
About mid-May every year, thousands of ACU students generally welcome the summer months with open arms, but not everyone in Abilene shares their excitement.
Many businesses in the surrounding area know with the summer comes necessary shifts in business strategy.
Tammy Barber, Peet’s Coffee and Tea manager, watched business drop this summer.
“I’d say at least half of our customers are college students,” Barber said. “A lot of them come in before 8 a.m., especially before class.”
Though many are customers, university students affect both sides of the counter. Of the nine current Peet’s employees, five are university students, and Barber could not confirm but believed all five to be ACU students. Barber said customer traffic has increased in the last week.
Sharky’s Burrito company manager Willie Valencia said Sharky’s suffered a 20 percent drop in customers. Lowering the labor costs by maintaining fewer employees is one way Sharky’s minimized losses during the summer.
“Everything just goes down without the college students,” Valencia said.
Joel Harris, founder of Box Office Video and owner and operator of the rental store for the past 11 years, has worked in the business world since 1980 and said significantly lower consumer spending over the past three months affected more businesses than just his own.
“Business this summer was the worst I’ve seen since I’ve been in business,” Harris
said. “It was a tough summer.”
Though college students made up a large percentage of his customers, Harris said their absence was not to blame for the slump. Typically, families who monitor their kids’ television exposure during the school year rent two to three times more often during the summer. Economic strains on middle class families have restricted spending, especially in his line of trade, he said.
“Once class starts, families slow down. Even though students are back, it takes a few weeks minimum to pick that business back up,” Harris said.
In such a unique, collegeoriented area, Harris and other business owners have developed strategies to compensate for seasonal fluctuation. Such strategies include additional advertising during the first weeks of school and the hiring of fewer summer employees.
