Some Carbondale businesses are set to face as much as a 50 percent drop in sales over the Christmas holiday as students will be taking their money with them.

Doug Diggle, owner of Old Town Liquors at 514 S. Illinois Ave., said the drop in sales is something businesses come to expect every year as the students leave town.

We’ve worked on our strategies years ago, Diggle said. We’ve been doing this for twenty years.

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Diggle is expecting a 50 percent drop in sales, and might shorten weekend hours an hour to compensate.

The AMC movie theater, at 1370 E. Main St., will be affected as well, since college students represent about 45 percent of income for the business, Andy Moutardier, manager of AMC, said.

The midnight shows on Fridays and Saturdays will definitely be affected, since almost 100 percent of that audience are college students, Moutardier said. But sales will depend of the types of movies we will be showing.

Moutardier said college students attend action, comedy and R-rated movies, so if the movie company schedules those shows over break, the theater sales will be affected more than if they showed family movies, which are targeted to the high school and grade school ages.

Dennis Haworth, manager of Discount Den at 819 S. Illinois Ave., said people would rather go out to the mall than go downtown over Christmas break.

We don’t have as much business over the break, and we have to cut back our hours as well, Haworth said. People feel its much easier to go out to the mall. It’s hard to fight this type of thing.

But Wal-Mart, at 1450 E. Main St., will not be hit as hard as other businesses, said Keith Peacock, co-director of Wal-Mart, said.

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We’ll notice the difference in customer flow in the evenings, Peacock said. We get a lot of college students who come in during the evenings.

But we won’t cut back our staff. There are usually about 50 percent of our student employees that stay during the break, so it works out.