A tip: If you see a plant at a chain nursery that is not in the proper environment, check it out. If it is still in good condition despite the improper cultural practices, buy it. Otherwise, move on. Getting emotional and complaining about it is gonna fall on deaf ears, and for good reason, often as not. They know already, I assure you. It's all about numbers. It's better to lose 25% of the inventory in the first two weeks, with the other 75% being purchased before the damage becomes a problem, than it is to stick them in an off-traffic area that is more to the plants ideal culture, and lose 50% of them while paying the labor and material costs of maintianing them until they finally sell. And 25 percent will end up potbound, mis-shapen and have to be tossed anyway.
Also, plant inventory changes more frequently throughout a year than about any other department inventory. As this happens, the percentages of plants that like shade and the ones that like full sun vary significantly month to month, season to season. But the general layout of any given nursery is relatively inadaptable.
So it's easy for someone with little or no nursery experience to say "Hey! That plant needs more shade! You guys have it wrong!"
No, they don't, at least from a marketing and potential loss/profit ratio measure. You have not considered the inventory turnover rate of that particular plant. They have. You have not considered whether the primary interest in that particular plant is generated by impulse, or is more often a requested and purposely sought-after item. They have. You have not considered the time the majority of the plant items can likely spend 'out of it's element, and still be viable when weighed against potential loss percentage. They have.
And I could go on, and on, and on.
Lack of these considerations are also why most private nurseries are woefully unprofitable. They don't have a clue where, how, or how long to keep inventory, when marketing has to be considered equally with cultural considerations. They may know plants well but they don't know when to cut their losses or minimise them in the first place. While the best and finest nurseries around are usually individually owned, for every well run, profitable nursery in existence, there are probably 10 that are piss-poorly run, and ofen as not have piss-poor plants, because they hold on to them too long, because they didn't sell well, because they put that shade loving plant back in the shade. where browsers never bother to browse.
There are certain constants in business, and one is "Consumers go to the light". They subsconciously tend to gravitate toward well lit areas when browsing, and tend to unconsciously avoid darker areas. Walmart, Home Depot, and such know this too.
People don't realize it but retailing is a science, and some laws overpower others and it really is generally for the greater good. And moving a ton of plants in a week from a less than ideal display location beats moving a 1/4 ton of them from the proper environment.
A few years back, after listening to the guy who ran a feed store complain constantly about barely keeping afloat, I finally told him why. His layout sucked. For one thing, he had all the feed right near the front door and the counter. He had a little seperate room with "hit-or-miss" tack accesorries tucked away in the back. All the normal feed store supplies were on the shelves closest to the counter behind the feed.
Convenient for the customer, after all, they only had to walk twelve feet to get all they came for, instead of a whole 75 feet. He listened intently as I told him how his layout was costing him BIG. He had no endcaps on his four rows of shelves. Slow moving stuff was dusty. He had plenty of room in his parking lot, yet he had all his larger Livestock feeders, hayrings and stuff out behind his place.
Long story short, the feed got moved to the back where people had to walk back down the aisle, where they could see some 10 dollar wormer and go "dang, I need some of that!" He moved some of his bigger farm equipment out in front of his store, and even knocked down a two small walls so the former tack room was now a highly visible corner in the shop. This was good, because he used to have a little sign that said "please turn light out when leaving tack room". Half the folks who shopped there didn't even know he HAD tack for sale. I'd been in there dozens of times before I knew. I just happened to walk in one day and someone had left the light on, lol.
As for painting the throw-aways orange, I think that is a novel idea to protect profitability, actually. As for composting it, sending a dead or half dead three dollar plant back through the supply chain to compost would be a logistical nightmare. Sure for one or even a few nurseries, that might be practical, but when you have thousands of nurseries it would be a fairly complex, and expensive, undertaking. As for farming it out locally, not likely. There are just so many variables, and one of the ways they offer us such great prices is by keeping policy uniform.
In a nutshell, this thread is essentially much adeu about nothing. They are doing it the same way anyone who knows how to run a profitable business involving thousands of nurseries would be doing it, assuming we were business wise enough to even be in a position tov be running that many. Sam Walton IS the very definition of the American dream, he is to be commended, not vilified. Running a few thousand nurseries is not easy, and overall, I've found Walmart, Lowes, and Home Depot to have nicer plants and a better selection than the majority of private nurseries I've been to, though again the best ones are usually privately run too, but they really aren't that common. "Most nurseries are crap" is not totaly inaccurate.
