The Business
Description | Customer Service the Oxymoron | The Art of Pricing
Description - The Garden Center
- The Garden Center, the destination of the disgruntled homeowner. It seems that everyone in America sees their house as an extension of themselves. If they're wealthy, you can tell by the landscaping. If they're not wealthy, you can tell by the lack of. The designs that people incorporate into their landscapes immediately tell you more about the person than you could probably get from meeting them. Messy, unkempt landscapes denote some sort of other devotions such as work or family, while some of the high pampered lawns just shout "Retired and Loving It!". Regardless of the social caste, the Garden Center is synonymous with Home Landscaping.
- The purpose of the Garden Center is to cater to those who need to spruce up their home landscape. Within the walls and greenhouses, a consumer finds everything to fulfill their gardening needs. They've got lawn mowers, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, pots, soils, mulches, decorations, and the big moneymaker, Live Goods. You enter with money in your hand and leave with a cart load of landscaping prospects. If you pick your Garden Center right, you can get everything you need for a whole year of gardening in just one trip.
Customer Service, the Oxymoron
- Don't you just love it when you go to a Garden Center and you can find one thing in the store and no employees to help you? It's a common occurrence as you probably well know, but there is more behind it than just uncaring employees.
- Take in to consideration that many Garden Centers are strapped for employees. It's not as much the fact that they can't get people hired, it's that working at a Garden Center is hard work and the prime employee prospects (High School Students) rarely have the work ethic or commitment to stay in the job long. In large department store chains with Garden Centers, if they are short on help, they just transfer help from other store departments. Can you imagine asking a gardening questions and getting the response, "I don't usually work in this department, I'm from shoes."? This doesn't mean that you can't find helpful employees, just don't be offended if one isn't available.
- The door to Customer Service, just admit it, swings both ways. I have always said that everyone in their lifetime should work in retail for at least 6 months, it makes you more tolerant towards employees that have to deal with people every day. The people that employees have to deal with on a daily basis can break even the calmest nerves. The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, definitely applies. One bad, rude, insensitive customer can ruin the rest of the day for an employee then every customer after that one has to deal with the employee's bad mood.
- Ah, it always comes down to money. I can't in one section completely explain the science behind item pricing, but I can give you an idea of what is influencing what you pay. There are college courses just for pricing and merchandising.
- Costs for the Garden Center that influence pricing
- Overhead - The money spent on wages, water bills, electricity, etc. by the Garden Center. It includes any costs associated with operating a business.
- Advertising- It does cost money to run those adds in the daily newspaper.- Costs that influence pricing of items (especially live goods)
- Production Costs - Includes the price of pots, soils, seeds, transplants, chemical applications, etc.
- LABOR, LABOR, LABOR - Producing plants involves a lot of people.
-What's in a name? - patenting or copyrighting plant names and other items costs a LOT of money, this includes the patenting process itself and the advertising necessary to get that new item out to the rest of the industry.
-Overhead - The rest of the miscellaneous costs necessary for operation- Why is one Garden Center More expensive than another?
- Labeling - some Garden Centers sell plants that are labeled generally (such as Impatiens or Geranium), thus they don't have to pay to use a copyrighted name on the tag.
- Profit by Department - The aim of any business is to make money. Some Garden Centers are just departments of a larger store. They don't necessarily have to get a huge profit in that department since they probably make more in the others. Because of this, they can mark their plants down to lower prices.
- Quality - although there can be differences in quality, the cheap plants and the expensive plants could both be in excellent condition but have completely different prices.
- Production Costs - Some Garden Centers buy plants from smaller, privately owned plant growers. These growers can't afford to sell their items at cheaper prices, in fear of being run into the ground by the "super-plant producers" This forces the Garden Centers to sell the plants for more.Back To Top