by Sarah Thomack
St. Joseph Post
Move-in day for students at Northwest Missouri State University is Friday and businesses in Maryville are cautiously optimistic about the expected uptick in business.
Greater Maryville Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Lily White says Maryville’s economic downtime is normally during the summer when college students are not in town. This year, that summer downtime started in March when students did not come back from spring break due to COVID-19.
“We saw, definitely a downturn, especially during the time that we had our mandated closure… but during that time especially, ‘shop local’ was something that all of our citizens were touting very loudly,” White says. “Some of our restaurants had to expand their phone lines to keep up with the number of carry-out calls they were getting. Our retail certainly suffered, but we’re also fortunate in that a lot of our retail had already worked to be online, so they didn’t suffer nearly as much as we saw the national average suffering.”
White says locally, unemployment peaked in April around 9%, still under the state and national average, and has since dropped to 5.1%. Their normal numbers typically hover around 3%.
Northwest football games typically draw big crowds and business to Maryville. White says things are still up in the air about football games and other sports and how that could affect businesses.
“Our businesses are still pivoting, they are not out of the woods, but we’ll have more answers after the college students get back as far as how our businesses are relating to that.”
White says after not having students in town for about six months, Maryville is excited to welcome them back, even though things are going to be different for everyone.
“We’re kind of in that, seconds before you hear, ‘3-2-1, go’ at a race, hoping that the race will still happen the way it normally does,” White says. “So we’re being very cautious as far as, we need these masks to work, we need the college students to come into town knowing that the mask mandate is a thing and that they are a huge part of our population that are going to have some control over how they respond to the mask mandate and also the social distancing side of it. But we’re also really excited to get that economic part back.”
Fall classes at Northwest begin Wednesday.