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Michigan tourism was booming this summer, but businesses aren’t out of the woods yet

Customers eat outside at Sabrina's Cafe in Philadelphia on Sept. 26, 2020.
Hannah Yoon for NPR
Customers eat outside at Sabrina's Cafe in Philadelphia on Sept. 26, 2020.

The summer of 2021 was lockdown free, meaning Michiganders were out of the house and flooding to their favorite businesses.

Spokesperson for the Michigan Retailers Association, Jennifer Rook, said there was a tourism boom this season.

"So the revenge spending trend we've been hearing across the country definitely hit our state," she said. "We benefited from all those tourism dollars."

A high amount of traffic was a plus for businesses across the state, but between the labor shortage and supply chain back-up, businesses could still struggle.

“If you have labor shortages, you don't have people working in distribution centers, you don't have people working in factories, shipping, everything that gets the products to the store," Rook said. "So that was impacting everything."

This was exactly the issue in Houghton Lake this summer. Tourism was strong, but keeping up with the flourishing foot traffic was difficult for business owners, according to Houghton Lake Chamber of Commerce Executive Director, Jay Jacobs.

“You go into, say, my local Walmart, and you'll see some bare spots on the shelves, because they didn't get the product in," he said. "In talking to their manager and some of the other grocery markets, they said that they're having the same issues that sometimes they just don't get what they ordered, or they get shorted, or they get part of the order.”

Overall, Jacobs said it was a great season for businesses in the area, despite the setbacks. He said some tourists even became permanent residents by upgrading their summer homes.

"What we're seeing is like, they have grandma's cottage, and they're in, let's say grandma's cottage was 900 square feet. Well, they're putting additions of 2,000 square feet onto grandma's cottage," he said.

For the state as a whole, Rook said she expects the labor shortage to be remedied by the cessation of federal unemployment. However, she said supply chain issues will likely last through the holiday season and into the first quarter of 2022.