The return of students to campus after nearly a month of winter break couldn’t come sooner for one group of Gainesville residents: small business owners.
Each year, local businesses brace for a mass exodus of students leaving the area and face the challenges of reduced revenue, short staffing and a lack of customers. These considerations are substantial barriers to stores that cannot quickly change their strategy to serve local rather than student customers.
The Alachua County Economic Performance Index, compiled by the National Economic Resilience Data Explorer, shows countywide gross domestic product, a measure that includes consumer spending, takes a noticeable dip during December. GDP also begins to decline in May, before summer vacation, with an incremental recovery in September, just after students return for the fall semester.
For some owners, this harsh reality is just the cost of doing business in a college town.
Jeremiah Loper, the founder and CEO of campus food delivery service 352 Delivery, has experienced the fall of winter for 11 years. Loper noted students who stay in Gainesville for summer classes continue to power the local economy, while nearly everyone leaves for the winter. This time, his income was cut in half.
“The winter holidays are far worse for local restaurants and businesses than any other holiday of the year,” Loper said. “It’s a lot longer and it’s also a lot more intense.”
As a food delivery service, Loper’s entire operation revolves around partner restaurants that remain open for business. But the best coping mechanism for some restaurants is to close entirely and cut labor costs, dragging Loper’s business in the process.
Loper said that instead of having 80 restaurants in his service inventory, he only had 45 or 50 open and available during the holiday.
“It’s pretty drastic,” he said.
Employees who stay in Gainesville during winter break may also be reluctant to see their hours cut or face a temporary break from the slowdown, Loper said.
“Many of the local drivers want to keep working,” Loper said. “And when you have half the amount of sales, that’s half the amount of orders that can go to them, half the amount of delivery fees that they make, and tips and things.”
Brian Gendreau, a clinical professor of finance at UF’s Warrington College of Business, said some businesses adapt to survive by reducing the amount of seats or servers they have. For others, outright closure is the best option.
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“It really has a bigger impact on those businesses that rely heavily on student traffic,” he said.
It’s not just reduced traffic that small businesses have to deal with, but the loss of employees. Gendreau said the same students who fuel the local economy at their own expense also make up a large portion of the workforce needed to keep those institutions running.
“Many of the employees are students and many of them probably want to go away on vacation. Supply and demand considerations are playing out here,” Gendreau said.
Not all stores are equally affected. Gina Marks, events and community relations manager at The Lynx Books in Gainesville, said the bookstore was an unusual example of what goes better than most during the holiday. Marks said the break is also an opportunity for owners and operators to recharge, much like students do during winter break.
“Our biggest season of the year is the run-up to Christmas because Christmas is when everybody wants to buy books for everybody,” she said. “I was a little surprised we weren’t touched more.”
Contact Daniel Bednar at dbednar@alligator.org. Follow him on X @Danielbednar5.
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Daniel Bednar is a first-year political science major and criminal justice reporter for The Alligator. When he’s not writing, you can find him diving in the Keys or flying airplanes.
