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Boone businesses booming with students’ return |
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Thursday, 23 August 2007 |
by STEPHAN OSTRANDER
Intern Lifestyles Reporter
Breathe easy, King Street merchants: we’re back.
This past weekend marked the arrival of students both old and new back to Boone, and few felt it more than local businesses, whose sales have already begun to increase.
“This weekend marked our highest record sales ever,” Macado’s general manager Michael Bosse said.
Bosse
said that this was not only due to the increased student population,
but also from the parents in town helping move their kids in.
However, this is not an unexpected phenomenon. Fall is typically the biggest time of the year for Boone area businesses.
“It obviously goes up [in the fall],” Capone’s Pizza manager Chris
Staggs said. “My sales are usually 15 percent to 20 percent higher than
in the summer.”
Appalachian Tees manager Terri J. Mork had a similar take on it.
“We welcome the return of students,” Mork said. “Move-in day and family days, our sales always go up during these times.”
In addition to a new semester, fall also brings football season, which Mork calls “a bull market” for King Street merchants.
 Businesses on King Street report an increase in profits with the return of Appalachian students.
| Trey Mahoney | The Appalachian
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“Football games are absolutely nuts,” she said.
“During the off-season we typically have three to four people on staff,
but for a football Saturday we have the entire staff working, all 15,”
Staggs said,
Macado’s also posts their highest sales during home football games.
Bosse said, it is not unusual to have a one to two hour wait for football fans wanting a pre-game or post-game meal.
“Football games get pretty crazy around here,” he said.
It’s not just the business owners that benefit from the boom either.
The servers and other tipped employees working on and around King
Street reap the rewards as well.
“I’ve already seen my sales go up at least 20 percent,” Macado’s
waitress and sophomore interdisciplinary studies major Ashley N. Botzis
said. “But I actually make better tips when it’s steady,
not a big rush all at once.”
Botzis expects her sales to go up even more when football home games begin Sept. 8.
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