Kristi Miller / Colorado Daily

Tyson Bowen, a senior at the University of Colorado at Boulder takes the 204 bus to his house on Moorhead after his summer class on Tuesday. Though many students attend summer school, Kari Reaves, the driver of this 204 route has noticed a sudden decrease in the amount of people taking the bus since the end of spring semester at CU.

The Hill, an assortment of stores, restaurants and entertainment venues on the west side of the CU campus ranging from the Fox Theater to Stellar Clothing – but consisting mostly of coffee and sandwich shops – keeps its businesses afloat by catering to the needs of its student neighbors.

And, for the nine months when school is in session, their college-age customers get them by just fine, but what happens in the summer when students finally have the chance to get out of town for a while?

“It’s pretty much understood that things slow down on the Hill in the summer,” said Paul Kemp, a barista at Buchanan’s Coffee Pub. “Just today my manager said that we did about 75 percent of what we would usually do during a morning in on a regular school day.”

According to Kemp, the 25-percent drop was “not as bad as we were expecting,” as most businesses told the Colorado Daily they expect to see as a 30 percent drop during summer months. For those who manage these stores, such as Louie Moschetti, owner of Jones General Store and Camera, pulling in business during the summer usually means a few alterations in how they run their businesses.

“You have to be careful in your purchasing of products,” said Moschetti. “You don’t want to be overstocked when you don’t have as much business coming in. We run more promos, which a good way to bring in people off the street who might not normally come in to buy something. We also added DVD rentals in December in hopes of getting the neighborhood people used to coming in here to rent DVDs and maybe buy something while they are here.”

According to Moschetti, the DVD rentals began in December as with the idea of countering some of the summer business drop-off. As owner of the store for two years, Moschetti first managed the store for 35, during which he learned that “you don’t want to wait until the summer is here to start making corrections.”

Hill shops taking hits of up to 30 percent also require less help to stay in business. Sometimes this may mean firings for non-essential employees, but for Moschetti, summer staffing tends to work itself out naturally.

”We don’t usually fire anyone or let anyone go,” he said. “We try to utilize the people that want to stay here – but when our student employees want to go home or go on vacation in the summer, we don’t typically need to replace them.”

Other Hill attractions, however, do not operate under the conventional retail business model, such as the Fox Theater, which, according to their publicist Shauna Murray, claims as much of a third of its total patronage as student-based.

“We definitely notice the absence of students in the summer,” said Murray. “We don’t necessarily change our business model – we still try to book good bands and good shows – there’s just a fewer number of shows overall throughout June and July.”

According to Murray, fewer shows in the summer “just goes with the territory for clubs in the summer” as more acts opt for outdoor gigs and tour with larger music festivals, but the decrease in the number of shows in any given month during the summer is also somewhat attributed to the lack of potential student attendance — which can be as much as 90 percent at the Fox for certain bands that tour there.

As far as impact from the student population goes, even public transportation around the Hill and campus areas is affected.

“We do have a lower ridership in the Boulder area during the summer months that is partly caused by fewer students,” said Scott Reid, Assistant General Manager of Public Relations for RTD. “We adjust our service levels during the summer months that correspond with school start-up and then school ending to put out the proper amounts of service that are traditionally used during those months. We typically make adjustments based on routes – so campus routes are adjusted downward slightly in order to correspond with the change in campus hours and the lower number of students.” Most Hill outlets, however, simply adopt one simple philosophy for getting through the off-season – a philosophy best described by Anthony Merino, General Manager at Half Fast Subs.

“The big thing during the summer is trying to attract residents around town and on the Hill who don’t necessarily make it down to the Hill when the kids are in town,” he said. “We switch up our advertising in the right places, put a few menus on doorsteps and try to pull them this direction.”