Sarasota boat races bring business

SARASOTA, Fla. (WWSB) – The power boat races have come back to the Suncoast. That doesn’t just affect the crowds that are at the races – anyone at St. Armands over the weekend saw the crowds trying to get to Lido Beach.

Events like this, which were missed over the last year, have a ripple effect on the other businesses around them.

“I opened both yesterday and today, and I’ve noticed a significant increase in business today as opposed to yesterday,” Tunaskin salesman Tom Leslie said. “I think yesterday was maybe the preliminaries and today was the Lido boat race.”

Leslie said that sometimes, events like this cause so much traffic that it actually detracts from retail sales. People don’t want to deal with the traffic to go shopping.

That didn’t happen the weekend of the races.

“I didn’t see that today. I was kind of expecting that, but I was happily surprised that it didn’t, so it really was a good overall day,” Leslie said.

Now, as the power boat races wrap up, people on St. Armands will return to business as normal – and they’re also trying to remember what normal is after a year away.

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