According to the World Population Review, Plain City has grown over 6% in the last four years. In that same amount of time, Plain City has welcomed numerous new businesses, including Brick House Blue, Ace Hardware, Drink Up, and Plain City Nutrition.
This suggests that Plain City is good for growing businesses.
Plain City’s Development page says, “Plain City’s strategic location near Columbus has positioned it as an attractive choice for developers and new residents. The ongoing residential growth in Plain City presents a promising landscape for business and industrial development. To ensure sustained prosperity, effectively manage growth, capitalize on emerging industry sectors, and diversify the local economy.”
Sophomore Gianna Cazares has lived in Plain City for 16 years and says she’s noticed changes over the years. “I have noticed a lot of smaller businesses popping up like the Red Hen and Drink Up,” she says. “I go to the soda shop and I study there. It’s nice to have places to go that aren’t my house to go and do my school work.”
The new businesses are good for the city because they help the city’s tax base.
Tim Dawson, owner of many small businesses in Plain City, including the Grainery, says that we need even more businesses. Coming here to Plain City and bringing all of my businesses from another city here to Plain City is very important to the village because that’s where the tax base is. It’s not in homeownership, it’s from businesses coming here to Plain City,” he says. “The more houses, it’s more of a responsibility for the village to take care of those houses and take care of all those homeowners and all of the streets and the roads and things. And that’s done by businesses more than it is homeowners. So we need the businesses to follow.”
One of the recent new businesses in the past year is Drink Up, a soda shop in the middle of Plain City where you choose a soda base and can add different flavor syrups to it and purees to it, and has a small selection of baked goods, some from Home Baked Blessings.
High school substitute and owner of Drink Up Tiffany Eudaily says, “We’ve been here 17 years, so we’ve seen a lot of growth, we’ve seen several
subdivisions come in, several businesses come in, some didn’t survive, but some have really, really flourished. A lot of new families, a new stoplight, I don’t know, lots of new developments in houses, probably mostly.”
She and her family opened Drink Up “because we love Plain City, and it’s a fun place to be.”
Now that they are open, they are looking to continue growing.
Eudaily says, “we’re going to have events to pull people to come in. We might do a karaoke night once a month, or once a week, we’ll do some carnival things to have people come to draw them to the shop, we’ll add things to the menu all the time.”
Business owners are not the only people that are focused on growth.
Jason Stanford Development Manager for the village of Plain City says, “A lot of our talk has been about bringing new into Plain City. We’re going to do a sidewalk replacement program to fix a lot of the sidewalks in town, which helps businesses because it makes the city more attractive to residents that live here. That small town charm helps bring customers in and helps keep the residents happy.”
Despite the construction and other changes that come with it, many students and residents are feeling good about Plain City’s growth.
Sophomore Ella Gribbel says “I’m able to hang out with my friends a lot more because there’s more areas to study. The Plain City Library has also made a lot of good improvements.”
