COLUMBIA, S.C. — People are filling shops and restaurants in Columbia this weekend.
As many students are celebrating graduation with bouquets of flowers and dinner with families, there are also many families celebrating Mother's Day together.
That has left many shops with an all-hands-on-deck style approach to the busy weekend.
"It's really been the perfect storm of a weekend for us," Garett Bright, manager at Grand on Main said.
Bright said this is their biggest weekend this year.
"We haven't seen sales like this since Christmas, so we're doing a great job," Bright said.
From chefs to servers to food, Bright said they've got everyone in to make sure the weekend goes off without a hitch.
With the influx of people, they have even launched their new robot server to help eliminate so much foot traffic for their staff.
"This just kinda alleviates one of these extra steps for where we can utilize our servers in a different way," Bright said.
Grand on Main isn't the only restaurant in town preparing for the big weekend. Desmon Davis, a manager at Smoked, said they took extra precautions to make sure they are ready to handle the volume.
"We went ahead and ordered extra things for the ones coming in, whether that is champagne, food orders, even with the supply chain issues we were still able to get a lot of those things in for people," Davis said. "We saw an influx of people coming in as starting Wednesday night. Thursday night was when things started getting busy.
And Davis added that Friday night was record-breaking for them.
"Probably about three times busier than normal," Davis said.
Restaurants aren't the only places seeing a rush of people. Flower shops are also busier than normal thanks to the events.
Chuck Delaney, manager at Carolyn's Flowers & Gifts said it had been "quite busy," but in a good way.
"It's a money-making time and it's very significant for us to have all the people coming in to visit us," Delaney said.