Landscaping supplies company Altico have made the decision not to pass on any increased haulage costs that have arisen due to the Gulf conflict.

Antony Harker explained to GTN Xtra: “Garden Centres are under enough cost pressure of their own, we cannot simply just push our cost problems on to them. We have to take responsibility for our own challenges and think smarter, managing transport and order quantities better in times like this can have a real effect on the cost, so we asked our customers to try to order in 12 pallets, rather than their normal minimum order. This means the number of drops per load is generally no more than 2 which removes the additional drop charges that we have would normally have incurred.  This calculates we can recoup about 60% of the surcharges we are facing without our customers taking any hit on price. The rest we have to take on the chin to protect our customers and their margins, it won’t last forever, we hope…

“Our customers need to be successful for us to be successful. It's lucky that we're in April when products are selling through fast, if they have a few extra pallets of the best sellers at this time of year is not much of an issue.

Antony explained the increased costs as a supplier are not only for outgoing delivery haulage which is between 15% and 27%, but also incoming product haulage, packaging costs soared by 40% initially but them came down, and the costs of diesel for the forklifts at their production site along with other things have all gone up. “Our team have been doing this a long time and are used to managing and mitigating increases. We have calculated out that overall, our costs have increased by 2.9%, so not a disaster, but still significant.

“We talked to our customers, they welcomed the plan and were happy to work with us and were of course pleased we were not attempting to add a surcharge. We didn’t dictate, we haven't said it has to be 12 pallets, we've said please work with us, help us out, but if you really can’t do 12 pallets, we are still happy to deliver less.

“It didn't surprise me how the customers reacted. Because when things go wrong in our industry, everybody sticks together and they help each other out. That's the great thing about our industry and we've seen that yet again.”