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her husband Allen, would rather be putting
customers onto new bikes.
“It’s caused a problem for any vendor,
any distributor, any source; and everybody’s
scrambling to catch up, so that’s really hurt,
and maybe helped at the same time,” she
said. “You have the enthusiasm for riding,
over and above other things, maybe there
are other sports that got curtailed, like
going to the gym or whatever other thing
that they were doing, and they were using
bikes as a substitute,” she said. “But it also
hurts where I don’t feel we can seed the new
enthusiasm and maybe convert them into
lifelong riders.”
A Fall Without Football?
worry, they get scared into thinking they
might have the virus, so I understand. But
it is tough on us as the owner and the man
agement team to cope with that on a daily
basis.”
Phommasith said he wants to hire more
people, but nobody is applying. Dale, who is
focusing on take-out, is facing the opposite
problem: He’s not doing enough business to
bring workers back.
“We don’t have our full staff back, and
I’ll be honest, I don’t know that there’s a
scenario in the next year where we will need
to have as many people on our staff as we
did before March,” Dale said. “With all the
different things that we did between lunch
service, dinner service, catering, we had a
pretty big staff, and we have about half of
them working right now. I don’t know that
we will be 100% anytime soon.”
Unexpected Opportunities
But as restaurants suffer, some other busi
nesses in Georgia’s college towns are report
ing increased sales over last year, including
Athens boutique Community.
feature
Can College Towns Recover?
RETURN OF STUDENTS GOULD BRING A REPRIEVE FOR BUSINESSES
By Ross Williams news@flagpole.com
C arrollton residents seeking fresh
seafood or a Mai Tail are still coming
out to Chef Tano Phommasith’s Little
Hawaiian, but not in the numbers they were
before the pandemic.
“We were averaging, before the pan
demic, about roughly 2,200 customers a
week, and closing on Sunday,” Phommasith
said as lunchtime customers in this college
town restaurant began to take their seats in
an indoor dining room festooned with surf
boards and other island decor. “Now, we
are averaging about 60% of what we were
before the pandemic. Slowly, we are seeing a
steady increase in sales and
customer count. But I think 5
we will never get back to
where we were.”
As COVID-19 continues
to keep many diners at
home, Phommasith said he
will have to cut expenses
and learn to get by with
fewer customers. “Besides, I
think there’s a lot of uncer
tainty,” he said. “We can
focus on ourselves and our
community.”
The University of West
Georgia is a big part of that
community. The campus is
home to over 11,000 stu
dents, faculty and staff cen
tered in Carrollton, which
has a population of about
27,000 people.
The University System
of Georgia’s 26 institutions
are preparing for in-person
classes in the fall, with some
schools offering increased
options for online classes
or planning to end the
semester early and conduct
final exams online. These
decisions will have a major impact on the
local economies that rely on these usually
bustling campuses.
Three of the state’s largest histori
cally Black schools—Morehouse College,
Spelman College and Clark Atlanta
University—are planning to open virtually
in the fall. Another major Atlanta private
university, Emory, will limit in-person
instruction to first-year students and a
small number of other courses.
When the University System of Georgia
suspended in-person instruction in mid-
March, business owners in college towns
felt the pain, said Athens restaurateur
Peter Dale. Dale, who owns The National,
Seabear, Maepole and Condor Chocolates,
looked on as nearly 40,000 University of
Georgia undergraduate and graduate stu
dents and 10,000 faculty and staff abruptly
stopped dining out. Worse yet were the can
celations of big events like graduation and
orientation.
“In the spring, we missed graduation,
which is our biggest week of the year,” Dale
said. “There’s more than just one day, it’s a
whole week of activity while the different
schools and colleges have their own ceremo
nies and events, all the spring parties and
parents’ weekend, so it’s not necessarily just
the student traffic, but it’s all the stuff that
surrounds the students.”
About 40% of Phommasith’s employees
have left. Little Hawaiian is taking extra
precautions to keep workers who don’t feel
well away from work, but that often means
short staffs.
“I would say the struggle for us is every
day somebody is calling out,” he said.
“They’re scared, and it might be legit, they
don’t feel good. And it’s very sensitive right
now. If somebody doesn’t feel 100%, they
Owner Sanni Baumgartner closed in
mid-March, just before colleges moved
online, and she recently reopened for lim
ited in-person business. Two things kept
Community going, Baumgartner said: the
rapid roll-out of an online store and the
decision to create and sell fashionable face
masks.
After reading about mask shortages
at nearby Piedmont Athens Regional,
Baumgartner started a fundraiser to keep
her seamstresses working by making masks
to donate. They now make masks for the
public as well. “That’s really been our life
line right now, the face masks, because it
was something we’ve never done before,”
Baumgartner said. “It’s really selling really
well online, and now also in-store, and we
got also a big order for UGA last month,
when we made 2,000 for their maintenance
workers that were the first people coming
back to work at UGA.”
UGA plans to reopen its campus for
in-person instruction in the fall with new
Takeout and socially distanced outdoor dining have not been enough for Pete Dale’s restaurants to fully recover.
protective measures in place, including a
mask mandate.
Baumgartner said she is grateful mak
ing face masks has allowed her to keep her
seamstresses’ sewing machines humming,
but she’s looking forward to the day there’s
no market for them.
“I don’t want to rely on the face masks
too much, because I think eventually, they
might just not be needed anymore, hope
fully, one day,” she said. “But at least it’s
giving us the opportunity at the moment
to keep this going while we’re figuring out
what this all will look like in the future.”
Back in Carrollton, Perpetual Motion
Bikes is filled with bicycles, but they’re
not for sale. They are nearly all in line
for repairs. As people sheltering at home
sought new ways to exercise without going
to the gym, many turned to bicycles, spark
ing a worldwide shortage.
More people riding bikes means more
tires and chains that need attention after
sitting unused, so Perpetual Motion has
been able to bring all four of its employ
ees back to work after closing down for
three weeks. Still, Mikki Griffin, who runs
Perpetual Motion Bikes in Carrollton with
The summer, which is often a slow season
for businesses in college towns even in
normal years, has given some college town
businesses a little time to breathe, said Dale.
For now, all he can do is try to make sure
customers feel comfortable
enough to continue placing
orders while keeping his ear
to the ground for news from
the university, and especially
the football team.
“Athens is kind of in a
unique position, and it has
such a large university in a
smaller town, and so we are
really dependent on what
happens at the university,”
he said. “We’re anxious to
see what happens in the
wider world, but also how
that impacts UGA. That
definitely has an impact on
what we do.
“What gives me a lot of
nervousness is football,” he
added. “It is certainly a big
thing that brings people to
town, and it seems like it’s
going to happen, but we
don’t know.”
Gov. Brian Kemp has
attempted to use the pros
pect of a football-less fall to
convince Georgians to wear
face masks. “Wear a mask or
socially distance yourself,”
Kemp, an Athens native, said at a press
briefing earlier this month. “We’re asking
people to do this for four weeks, and let’s
flatten the curve again. It will give the hope
of us having a college football season.”
But what the season will look like for the
Bulldogs and Georgia’s other college foot
ball squads is uncertain. The Southeastern
Conference is still planning to play, but two
other conferences, the Big Ten and Pacific
12, have both decided to move to a confer
ence-only schedule. The SEC was not set to
play against the Big 10, but had two games
scheduled against members of the Pacific
12.
Some Georgia schools, including
Morehouse College, have announced they
will not be playing football in the fall.
In an interview on ESPN’s “The Dan
Patrick Show,” last week, SEC Commissioner
Greg Sankey said he wants games to go on,
but what happens will depend on the virus’
spread and the decisions of other leagues.
Other options, including suspending games
until spring, are still on the table. ©
This article originally appeared in the Georgia
Recorder (georgiarecorder.com).
6 FLAGPOLE.COM | JULY 29, 2020