More Pie, Please

Chris Beytes

According to the annual USDA Floriculture Crops Summary, Americans have been buying fewer and fewer bedding plants since 1999.

Why the decline? Lots of little reasons, including:

• We don’t have the retail store expansion we did in the ’80s and ’90s. Back around 2000, Home Depot opened a new store once every 48 hours, for a total of 2,274 (1,977 in the U.S.). Walmart and Lowes were on similar expansion trajectories back then. Today, we seem maxed out with big boxes. In 2015 (the most current info available), Home Depot opened no new stores in the U.S. and opened just four new ones in Mexico and one in Canada.

• Fewer, but larger, units. When I entered the business in the early ’80s, the 1206 flat was king. That’s 72 plants in an 11 x 22 footprint. Today, that flat has been replaced by 10 or 12 plants in 4-in. pots. Or a couple of big containers with five or six plants each. So we’ve dropped from selling 72 plants to selling maybe a dozen. The dollars may be different, especially if those plants are now vegetative instead of seed, but it still has impacted production levels.

• Less gardening in the ground. Whether because of lack of time, lack of space, lack of knowledge, lack of patience, lack of interest or sheer laziness, consumers are planting fewer flower beds than their mothers and grandmothers. A pot and a couple of baskets means a lot fewer units and dollars than several flats of annuals.

• Less speculation and less shrink. Less waste is a good thing, but it impacts the data. You’re no longer filling your greenhouses to 110% capacity and praying for a good spring because every dumped plant is profit going into the compost pile—lost profit that you can’t afford.

The big question, however, shouldn’t be, “Why are we flat?” but instead, “How do we reverse the trend and grow the pie?”

Some might suggest changing the problems above, but chats with experts say that won’t work. For instance, additional stores might increase production for a short time, but research has proven that big-box outlets steal market share from other large big-box outlets and groceries. So we only shift who gets to eat which slice of the pie, we don’t make it bigger.

Can we convince gardeners to plant flower beds again? Unlikely. Can we convince them to spend more? Also unlikely. Good retailers can boost consumption through inspirational displays, but consumers only have so much money to spend.

And, of course, we don’t want to reverse the “shrink the shrink” trend because that will potentially cost you money.

What we don’t talk about enough is how we can go after the approximately 50% of the populace that buys NOTHING from us—not a single pot, pack or cut flower (according to 14 years of data from the American Floral Endowment’s Consumer Tracking Study).

That’s a big number, folks. We’re talking more than 62 million households who don’t spend a dime on flowers or plants! Why not target them to boost our sales? A bit of math shows that each consumer who gardens is worth $22 in wholesale bedding and garden plant sales. Get five million more folks gardening and we have $110 million more in grower dollars.

Another opportunity for increasing the pie is streetscaping. Michigan Avenue in Chicago has proven the value of a beautiful streetscape to store owners and consumers alike (and it just won a 2016 American Society of Landscape Architects Landmark Award because of it). People spend more time and money with retailers, crime goes down, happiness goes up … streetscapes are a win-win-win.

America in Bloom knows this and is the country’s biggest proponent of streetscaping and community beautification. Instead of consumers having to visit a nursery or garden department to see our products, AIB encourages communities to put flowers and plants where people live, work and play. Does it trickle down to personal consumption? Perhaps. But in the meantime your town and local businesses have consumed your products and that’s a step toward growing the pie.

As an industry, we spend an awful lot of time and energy preaching to the choir. Instead, why don’t we hit the streets and show the non-gardeners what they’re missing. GT