The heat continued to take its toll on garden centre sales last week. We’ve now had five consecutive weeks of sales volumes down on last year. And even plant sales dropped below last year’s volumes for the first time since mid-April.
Hopefully the rain and cooler weather this week will re-ignite gardening activity and most importantly make it more appealling for people to eat and drink in garden centre restauarants.
In all the years we’ve been reporting on garden centre sales this is the first time we’ve had consitent reports to say that catering has been down.
Perhaps air conditioning will move up the list of priorities when it comes to re-vamping and increasing coffee shop and restauarnt seating areas.
But then again we’ll have all forgotten about the heatwave by the time Christmas is in full swing during October!
GTN Bestsellers Top 50 sales volumes compared to the same week last year: week 31