Small businesses in college towns struggle without students

MICHIGAN, US: Perry Porikos sat in the street outside one of his five businesses, in a makeshift patio area that didn’t exist before the COVID-19 pandemic sent his best customers — University of Michigan students — back home in mid-March.
The Greek immigrant arrived here more than four decades ago as a 20-year-old soccer player for the Wolverines and part-time dishwasher at The Brown Jug Restaurant, which he now owns. He drops the names of sports stars such as Michael Phelps, one of the many former Michigan students he counts as friends, and recalled hustling enough to own more than 10 businesses at one time.
“Living the dream that people talk about, especially if you live in Europe and you come here,” Porikos said. Lately, though, it has been difficult for Porikos to rest easy. And he’s not alone.
The stakes are high for all the small business owners near the Michigan campus in this city of about 120,000 residents — about one-third of them students.
Small businesses around the world are fighting for survival amid the economic fallout from the pandemic. Whether they make it will affect not just local economies but the fabric of communities.
The fall term will begin on Monday with some in-person classes on campus, which has generated equal parts of hope and anxiety for those who need students to return to pay the bills.
Will students take the measures essential to keep infections from surging? The early signs aren’t promising. Alarmed by pictures of unsafe partying, the Ann Arbor City Council this week enacted an emergency ordinance that reinforces the state’s requirement to wear masks and also places restrictions on gatherings.
Across the country, business owners in college towns share the fear that student support could dry up almost entirely, and many are scrambling for survival strategies.
Nick Ducoff, co-author of “Better Off After College,” said businesses catering primarily to students might be able offset some losses through delivery and e-commerce, but that many could find the effects devastating.
“Smaller town-and-gown communities will suffer if students stay with their parents and don’t return to campus, but colleges in cities with larger populations and more diversified economies like Austin and Boston will be less affected,” Ducoff said.
In Ann Arbor, Espresso Royale Coffee — just steps from an arched walkway on The Diag, a collection of diagonal sidewalks in the middle of campus — already has its windows covered by brown paper. The once-successful shop closed and is not coming back due to the pandemic, according to its website.
“Espresso Royale is the first place that you see when you come through that arch,” 22-year-old University of Michigan graduate Chris Young said as he dined with friends at Good Time Charley’s patio. “To hear that was gone was really, really surprising to me. Also, just really sad because it shows the impact that all of this has had on something that’s so central and personal to so many students.”
About two blocks down, a sports bar and a nightclub that Porikos owns are at least temporarily shuttered due to an executive order from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer because alcohol accounts for at least 70 percent of their gross receipts.
Others who own businesses on or near the three-block stretch known as South U are praying that they can hang on long enough to still be standing whenever it becomes business as usual again.
“This is going to be an unprecedented time that we’re entering into to see if this street can survive,” said Justin Herrick, the co-owner of Good Time Charley’s, a neighborhood staple since the late 1970s.
When the pandemic sent many of the school’s 40,000-plus students back to all parts of the globe earlier this year, the center of the college town’s small-business district became eerily quiet.
“It was like a three-foot blizzard without snow,” recalled Richard Schubach, who owns Replenish, a small grocery store across the street from campus, on the ground floor of a high-end apartment complex that caters to students.
While The Brown Jug and Porikos’ Backroom Pizza have been open and are expected to survive, the doors at the nearby Blue
Leprechaun and Study Hall Lounge that he also owns may stay closed for good. “If I don’t have higher capacity, I cannot make it,” Porikos said.