My Eventful Uneventful Sunday

It was an interesting Sunday at Gali's Garden Center this past weekend. I've worked there since 2001, and I always forget when the bottom drops out for sales. This Sunday, the bottom did in fact drop out for a few 15-minute spans in the afternoon. There were times when the empty parking lot called for a roaming tumbleweed.

It has always amazed me at how fast a garden center parking lot can fill up...and in the same breath, how fast it can empty out as the season begins to wane. Luckily for us, an empty parking lot coincided with a not-so-busy Chagrin Blvd. at around 5:40 p.m. We, the staff, were wrapping up things inside the property lines - sweeping, watering, closing vents, etc.

On the other side of the curb, well that's another story. We received a phone call from a couple drivers/customers of Gali's. "One of your carts is in Chagrin." This doesn't happen too often, but it has happened, where one of our annual carts positioned in our parking lot snuck out and rolled its way into a usually busy street. No one was hurt, no cars damaged, no plants lost. Phew! Just looking at the photo above, you can see we're big risk-takers.

Other than our end of the day excitement, a couple new things to hit Gali's are worth a mention. How about these Serenity White Bliss African Daisies. I remember seeing these in one of our Variety Central sections, but this is the first time I've seen them up close. Kinda cool.

Also, the new cardboard dumpster. Chris Murray, one of my pals (and a manager) at Gali's, has been pushing for this dumpster for a while now. He's done plenty of research on the benefits of it and I'm happy to see they've made the leap.

Speaking of Chris, he showed me this email he received from one of the big nurseries he orders from. I love the Lemon Daddy. My parents stopped into Gali's a couple weekends ago and I peer pressured them into buying one for their yard. They said, "We don't have the space." To which I replied, "It doesn't matter, the yellow leaves are really cool." Spoken like a true generation Y-er. I digress.

Look at this ad! And look at the Lemon Daddy...the one in the suit, not the hydrangea. This is just one of those ads that doesn't answer any questions and doesn't get you excited to buy, it simply succeeds in making you laugh...and also wonder, what were they thinking.

Lastly, I know there's Cockadoodle-doo, and Moo-Nure and even Zoo-Doo, but I learned of one more this weekend. We had a female customer come up to the counter asking us if we had any "sheep poo." I'm not too familiar with it, but I guess it was call BahBahDoo. Hilarious. Her husband chimed in, "It was really bahhhhhd."

Cautious Optimism

The recession didn’t entirely slam the retail garden industry the way it did the rest of retail. But there are some signs that retail in general is looking up - or at least looking better than it did before.

Retail Forward is reporting that despite deterioration of same-store sales in May (except for Wal-Mart, of course), it appears shoppers are showing signs of letting up from the current "belt-tightening behavior." Shoppers reported in Retail Forward’s May ShopperScape survey that they are less inclined than last year to limit their spending, seek deals or trade down to lower-priced brands and retailers in response to the economic downturn.

Did you see customers "trading down" this spring? We were hearing reports of foot traffic increasing but average ticket decreasing. Did this hold true for you? And if it did, do you think customers will stick with this type of spending for a while?

GroGood Campaign

Check out these veggies!

I visited the Scotts Miracle-Gro Co. headquarters in Marysville last week with Rick Welder, our sales account representative on Today's Garden Center. While we were there, we took a quick look at the raised bed gardens the company created as an internal contest and as part of the GroGood campaign to donate fresh produce to local food banks.

It's a great cause, and it looks like lots of Scotts employees have gotten into the spirit by planting rows of veggies to care for throughout the summer. The one bed that really caught our eye, though, was the one planted by the research and development team (the picture above). The rest looked pretty meager compared to the giant, leafy veggies being cared for by these guys.

I think I might have an idea who's going to be winning that company-wide contest!

Want to know more about the GroGood Campaign? Here's the link: http://www.scotts.com/grogood

~Jen

Garden Center Mania

Jen Polanz here. I visited Donzell’s Garden Center in Akron late last week, along with Graf Growers and my little local greenhouse, Wyatt’s in Mentor (that’s Ohio, and if you live here long enough, it’s pronounced Menner). I'm starting with Donzell's and I'll do separate entries for Graf and Wyatt's. Plus, you'll see more of Donzell's in the July issue of Today's Garden Center in the Idea Gallery section.

I was impressed with Donzell’s overall. I felt like the layout made sense, and - Ernest Wertheim would appreciate this - there was very clearly marked entrance that was separate from the exit. The first thing I saw when I walked in was a little pathway of statuary, which you don’t see often first thing in the retail shop. But I thought it worked. I meandered for quite a while, and the signage helped me through the whole place. I felt very comfortable, despite never shopping there before.
Couple of things I noticed that I liked:

This display just really struck me. It's the first one you see right when you walk into the greenhouse, and sets the tone for the rest of the place. Very fun and funky.

Check out these wide aisles. There's little to no butt brush going on here (yes, I stole that from Paco Underhill, in case you were wondering).

Yep. That's a trash can. There were several around the building. It's simple, but not something I often see in garden centers, especially smaller ones.

This is my cart when I walked out. I wasn't planning on buying anything, but they got me with the herbs, and then I added a tomato plant. They had the Garden-tone cross merchandised with it, so I picked up some of that. Then I thought, heck, I'm spending money, might as well go get that bird feeder I wanted to put in the back yard. Then I needed a hook for it. Do you see how this all starts to add up?

Another idea that's good for the customer and the retailer is a cooler full of water and pop at the registers. Sometimes it's sweltering in the garden center, and customers will drop a couple of extra bucks to quench their thirst after a shopping excursion.

Learn more about Donzell's at www.donzells.com, and read on for Graf Growers.

Graf Growers

Graf Growers was a much different vibe than Donzell's. It was in a slightly more rural area, from what I could tell, and consisted of a main retail shop, a couple of hoop houses and two large tents.

Oddly enough, Graf had a point-of-sale system, where Donzell's did not. Graf also did a nice job of merchandising smaller products at the register for impulse buys, like in the picture above.

I also liked how Graf used hanging basket tags to suggest other products, like Miracle Gro's Bloom Booster. It even offers 75 cents off any size.

And finally, I just love, love, love this pot from Scheurich. I'm not sure if this is new or if it's been around a while, but it's fun.

Check out Graf Grower's online at www.grafgrowers.com.

Wyatt's

This one will be short, mainly because I didn't take any pictures at Wyatt's. It's a tiny little greenhouse that's within walking distance from my house, which automatically makes it "my" garden center.

It's not much to look at, but the quality is decent and it's convenient. It's amazing how much traffic they get during the spring - they hire high school kids on the weekends to do nothing but direct traffic.

There's a lot wrong with it. I could go into great detail, really. But really doesn't it boil down to one thing: are they making money? I gotta say, yeah. They put very little back into the infrastructure, other than routine maintenance. They do a massive business in the spring (driven by a pretty established 7-mile radius of single-family home neighborhoods), carry some mums and host a hay maze in the fall, and turn a few poinsettias and firewood in the winter.

In these three blog posts we've looked at a good, better and best of garden centers. So who's doing it "right?"

U.S. Food Safety Concerns Continue

This is not good news, per se, but it continues to reaffirm why customers are determined to grow their own food - a recent New York Times story reported frozen food companies have labeled products in such a way to take the responsibility for killing harmful pathogens away from them.

One example cited ConAgra, which in 2007 could not identify which ingredient in its frozen pot pies was contaminated with salmonella. It could have been the peas. Or the carrots. Or potatoes. Or perhaps the turkey. After several attempts to find the culprit, the company passed the buck and labeled the 69-cent pot pies this way: "Internal temperature needs to reach 165 degrees F as measured by a food thermometer in several spots."

ConAgra isn’t the only one doing this, either. Other frozen food manufacturers are placing the onus on consumers to cook products well enough to kill salmonella and E.coli pathogens.
Is it any wonder your customers are now flocking to your stores to buy veggie, herb and fruit plants and trees?

And wouldn’t a fresh, homemade pot pie (like the one pictured above) taste so much better than a frozen one that may or may not make you sick?