Will the Washout from the West be as bad for garden centre business as the Beast From the East?
Another weekend of high winds and rain pushed the GTN Bestsellers All Products Sales Index down to the lowest level the past 10 years for week 8.
Although sales increased by 5% on the previous week, by last Sunday the year to date sales, as monitored via EPoS data by GTN Bestsellers, had dropped to -0.5% down on last year and 7.4% up on 2018.
It was Week 9 in 2018 that we first got hit by the Beast from the East and garden centre sales hit an all time low. With a brief respite to the rain and some sunshine in parts of the country hopefully Week 9 2020 won't see a repeat of that.
In an interview with GTN for the March issue, Steve Harper suggested that all garden centres should be making the most of soil improver and conditioner sales over the coming weeks. "Garden Centres should be offering multi-buys of soil conditioners now as the soil structure and all nutrients will have leached out as a result of all this rain."
You can read GTN's full interview with Steve Harper about the Growing Media Responsible Sourcing Scheme using this link
