Mother’s Day records despite drop in volumes First reports of records broken for March from Alton Garden Centre
As we reported in GTN Xtra last week garden centres across the country had record sales over Mother’s Day weekend as people flocked to garden centre restaurants and coffee shops.
And those high sales levels are continuing this weekend leading to record totals for March as reported by Andy Bunker at Alton Garden Centre in Wickford, Essex: "I've just finished number crunching March and it's our best ever in the Plantaria here at Alton, up by 46% which means year to date we are plus 34% and that is the best ever start to the quarter. I guess Brexit is really biting here in Essex."
Andy added yesterday: "It's also a good job I don’t buy to the weather. I did hear it was supposed to be awful today with wind and rain. Okay, it’s not a heatwave but by 2pm we've had no rain and only a bit bit of wind. The car park is full and it's good gardening weather. That makes me very cheerful!"
According to GTN Bestsellers Epos data analysis the record sales over Mothers Day weekend didn’t quite equate into sales volumes for the whole week. Plant sales volumes dropped by 8.3% with some centres reported high sales of Italian specimen plants as gifts which will partly account for the drop in volume but deliver higher turnover. Garden Products dropped by 14.1% and Growing Media by 17.5%.
As with high value plant sales, early furniture and BBQ saleshave been reported as encouraging, contributing to further boosts in value of sales if not volume.
Overall, week 12 was a better week than last year, even though it was Easter in 2016 but as you’ll see from our GTN Bestsellers Top 50 charts (links below) the big wins were last minute gifts and garden lighting.
GTN Bestsellers Top 50 sales volumes compared to the same week last year...
