Deb, I know of a nursery (well-established, but not gigantic) near where I live that never has sales. They just keep things from the previous year and, like you said, have bigger plants next year for higher prices.

The only reason why I see most establishments feel compelled to have end-of-season sales is when their stock is all half-dead. But of course, in business where they take much better care of their plants, this isn't necessary.

-Audric

Deb,
When I had my nursery I ran a 'special' on just one type of plant every week from April through September and advertised it in the Friday edition of the local newspaper. It worked well for me and kept a constant stream of customers coming to the nursery.

We don't really have an end of season here in Berkeley, (though I do close for January, no reason to be open when it is pouring rain and everyone is grumpy...), but the stock that hasn't sold by then will just be moved up in pot size and be sold for more in the spring.

I do have occasional bargain offers though, usually I offer four paks of plants I have more backstock than I feel I should... or during the spring rush I plan on having extras of things that people would like in mass; echeveria, sempervivum or even lush little pots of sedum. If my customers buy four from the offered group of plants I give them 20-25% off (I do not give punches on my frequent buyer cards on discounted items though).

For small growers, unless wintering over cost are too high, keeping the stock to have larger more expensive plants next season can work. My stock of four foot-plus tall multi-armed Cliestocactus straussii started out as seedlings, just like the ones I sell in four inch pots... they just didn't sell as a cute furry little babys, so they moved out to the growing beds for a few years and now they are selling for a whole lot more...

Good luck,

Hap

End of season sales on nursery stock, as opposed to annual stock, is a brain-child of the box or retail sales stores who carry those items as an aside. What the lleh else can they do with it when they drag the christmas tree ornaments out in August? LOL.

People equate those sales lots as nurseries, even though they aren't and then assume independants must do the same thing. No.........no.........and triple no. I do not mark down perennial stock because every year I carry it over, it gets larger and more valuable since I take care of it and size it up when it needs to be.

I have had clients get irate about that, when they bypass the marked down annuals. The planting season in northerly zone six for perennials and woody stock lasts as long as a spade can pierce the earth. Why put something on sale when you are at the peak of the season when the milder weather of fall is upon you? The exceptions to my rules are when I have a slew of liner stock in smaller than quart sizes I have raised myself and know it would be more than enough to plant half the state. I do not carry over excessive stock.

It depends. With my business I like to order more than I need at the beginning of the season to offer the best selection to clients. However, at the end of the season there is too much left over and lowering the price is a good way of getting rid of stuff that I have a hard time over wintering. Although I can over winter some stuff. Now is the time to get rid of perennials. Bulb season is not too far off! As far as 'specials' I don't have them. I casually lower the price depending on how badly I want to get rid of a plant, but I never take a loss and always make a profit. Otherwise there is no point in selling it. When I do lower the prices it's always for a very small minority of plants and always at my advantage to do so. Good luck

Absolutely not! I run a special each week also on a featured plant (or group of plants). I think also if you start that precedent, you are going to have some customers that will wait until the last minute to buy, and bug you about why they aren't on sale yet, or since they will be going on sale soon, can't I get a reduced price now?

Not if they don't know the price is reduced. It's all in how you communicate the price.

No. Although it's not my decision to make, it's not done where I work. Not even on annuals. We try to keep our stock healthy and looking great, and get rid of it if it looks bad. Mid-summer we will pull less than ideal looking product (but that is healthy) and mark them down super cheap. They go out in the parking lot on pallets.

We occasionally have sales on specific items or groups of items, when we have overstock, or we don't want to overwinter them (like roses at this time of year).

This year, sales were a bit slower in spring due to weather, but just keep on moving along, so some things I usually put on sale, I never did (vegetables and traypack annuals).

Here comes a dissenting opinion!! Yes, we do have an end of season sale, although it is not referred to as that and is not simply a clearence of tired, shopworn plants. Our sale is in mid-September and is titled a "fall planting sale" - fall in the PNW is the VERY best time for planting nearly any permanent landscape material.

We buy in fresh product for this sale, both nursery stock, perennials and seasonal annuals. Folks come and buy in very large quantities - often they are homeowners who have had landscape designs done for them during the season and are now ready to purchase and plant in bulk. The offshoot of this is that the less seasonal items that have been around a bit go flying out the door as well. With few exceptions, mostly just spring ephemerals that have gone or are going dormant and small sizes I have had potted up, there are few perennials I have to winter over. Yes, we operate a full 12 months of the year but my winter perennial selection is primarily limited to more evergreen items and groundcovers.

It's become an annual event and very well received, as customers know they will be getting fresh, healthy stock for good prices. And we are able to get some excellent prices from our suppliers - they are clearing out their stock in prep for new propagation over the winter and since we buy a reduced selection but in large numbers, they pass on some very low costs.

We are a smaller retail nursery and find that an end of season sale is a good way to move stock items which do not overwinter well. We put items such as bougainvillea , tree ferns , mexican marmelade bush , dipladenia mandevilla , ixora , bamboo palm and other tender palms and cupheas etc on sale. We find it helps to sell your stocks of these right out so you have none on hand to over winter and can buy in new freshly grown ones in early spring that look good rather than last seasons frost bitten old stock which will need about two months to look good (missing the early season buying frenzy).

Thank you all, so much, for all the replies! You have really helped this beginner out... A LOT!!!! :)

"End of season sales on nursery stock, as opposed to annual stock, is a brain-child of the box or retail sales stores"

I hear so much misinformation on the web sometimes. Sorry not picking on you but come on get real.

When did the nursery first come about and when did the "box store" show its face?

YouÂre saying that nurseries a hundred years ago did not have sales? Makes no sense.

I read this thread last night and I had to think about it.

It's the bottom line you have to think about period. I here things link you canÂt sell a plant at a loss. We'll no kidding. If by putting an item on sale puts that item in the loss category then your not selling that item at a high enough price in the first place.

Bottom line. It's all about the bottom line. If your incorporated and don't show a profit your at risk of loosing your status. Do you not want to show a profit? IsnÂt your goal to make as much money as possible and provide the best stock?

What does your AR and G/L look like at the end of the year? Are you happy with it? DonÂt business rules apply? I know every small/medium grower wants to be successful but that also means profitable. That means you sell every thing you can this year. Then sell everything you can next year.

Hold on to stock that didn't sell? How long are you going to hold that stock? If it didnÂt sell this year are you confident you are going to sell it next year? What's your cost for holding it one more year? Add that to your sale price.

This thread goes along with the over-wintering thread. Grow your second year flowering stock during the summer let them over-winter then do everything in your power to sell everything you have the next season. If that means putting it on sale by all means do it. Does that mean selling it a loss? Again youÂre selling to low in the first place.

We pitch it if the plant fails to meet our standards but that does not mean we take a loss. You canÂt look at each plant you must look at the whole business.

Put the company first. The rest (profit) will follow.

Sorry for the rant must be the heat.

It probably depends on the profile of your customers, but I find that reducing my prices has minimal impact upon our plant sales.

With sales, I always feel that you risk sending a negative message to the client that your prices were too high in the first place. Therefore we don't bother with seasonal sales, but price our products fairly with respect to the current market values.

As a producer, the advantage with perennials is of course, as others have said, is that you can pot them up, or even divide them up into smaller pots to increase your stock. Therefore I'm not particularly motivated to slash and burn my prices. If a particular plant doesn't sell at all, or I think its just not up to scratch, it goes on the compost heap. You quickly learn to be ruthless, although sometimes buying patterns are vastly different from one season to the next.

However if you are buying to resale as opposed to producing yourself, a sale is a logical way of trying to clear unsold stock. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Mylu.......I think you are reading more into my statements than I intended to put forth. My guess is you shop at boxes.

This is not box bashing at all. I have been a profitable business for nearly two decades, and given the track record of small business in general and floriculture in particular, I have thought out the bottom line long ago, but thank you for explaining it anyway.

The idea I was implying is that stores who exist only to sell perishable stock have no CHOICE but to move it out before winter or any off season. They move it out because there is no simply no place else to put it, but out the door. Boxes pretty much drive the industry now, whether like it or not. All of us are influenced by it in one respect or another and just learn to deal with it.

When the boxes start giving their goods away at less than cost at season's end, the public expects to load up in the suv and make their loops and have absolutely every sales lot, independent or not following suit. I get them every summer.......it's sort of like making the yard sales an all-day event.

Of course independants have had sales, just like I still have sales, but we are a lot more choosy about how much loss we want to take on it. LIke the boxes, we unload what we must, but it wasn't until the boxes we were expected to give them away. Our local *mart was selling some rather choice rhodies and azaleas in one gallons for a dollar and a half. I can't buy them in for that by the truckload. So, no....I'm not going to sell them for that. And until the boxes started doing it, nobody expected me to. Get real yourself.

The big box stores do not grow their own. They do not put in long days to produce what they sell. They do not put their blood, sweat and tears into what they sell. I DO!
My time is worth a he(( of alot more than what my plants are being sold for. I may be just getting started in this business, but I HAVE had people coming back for more. And complimenting me on what they had bought in the past from me, and how healthy and beautiful their plants are. I have full confidence in the product I am selling. And full confidence in my ability to grow that product. I'll be damned if I am going to give it away just because "the others do" :)

Let me just throw out a couple of thoughts - discounted sales are marketing techniques, much the same as advertising or any other promotional endeavors. You will never be successful at "sales" if all you offer are clearance sales or use discounted sales as a way to move unhealthy, insightly, overgrown stock.

Sometimes small operations are so close to their product they don't see that. You become attached to your plants (and rightly so) and understand all the hard work, time and effort - that translates to a monetary investment - that went into producing them. So it is easy to overlook that discount sales can be a huge source of income to your business if done correctly. First, you don't ever want to discount plants below their cost, which you should have very clearly assessed even as a grower. And you want to time sales to coincide with specific events or draw in customers when normal sales traffic may be lagging. For example, in mild climate areas where appropriate, a fall planting sale, or now during the dog days of summer when it is too hot for regular foot traffic, my nursery is having a lavender festival with all lavenders discounted, but only for the extent of the festival. This is clean, fresh healthy stock brought in for the sale, not leftovers.

Clearance sales, like the typical end of season sale, will draw out the bargain hunters but can also provide an unfavorable impression if all that is offered is tired, shopworn plants. If you look at discounted sales as a way to increase traffic during slow periods or to feature specific plants or planting times, you will have much better success, increase income and maintain a high quality reputation. Leave the clearance or EOS sales for the box stores and make your discounted sales an event rather than a way to get rid of outdated stock.

Occassional visitor to this forum, jumping in.

I work 2 days a week at a small local nursery. We NEVER have sales, except for once, the owner brought in a truck load of plants to sell at bargain prices--aprox $2-4/ gal for plain hostas, a few dwarf burford hollies, Carolina jessamine, etc.

If it's slow, like it's been lately, we just sigh. I doubt we'll ever sell the begonias and geraniums and impatiens still left over from spring, still occassionally trimmed and deadheaded by us (we do so religiously during spring, get lots of compliments about how nice our plants look compared to other places..), and so, come sometime in fall, out those poor unwanted plants will go--to the trssh.

This week, I started moving up/dividing the 4 inch perennials into gallons. More plants for next year.

I have visited a nursery that sold a few half dead gallon perennials for half price, but I just happened to be there, can't remember if they advertised that sale or not.

The other day at work I was glancing through a fairly recent copy of a freebie industry mag, maybe Nursery Managment? The one w/ the lady who owns a HUGE independent nursery in CA, Alden something? on the cover.

In that mag, there was an article about how to have a sale every week kind of thing. The author suggested highlighting ONE plant each week, like Nandina suggested, several posts above. That plant display was to be 1/3 back from the main entrance, w/ big signs, good labeling, and LOTS of the plants. Customers would see it immediately as they entered the store, but it wouldn't block their passage to other parts of the nursery. The author had several other neat suggestions, but I think a customer came in and I couldn't finish the article.

Perhaps that technique would work in your situation.

I wish the big plant vendors would back off their hurry-up quick marketing campaigns, some, and realize that not EVERY person in America NEEDS mums by mid August or Impatiens in early Feb. Southern growing seasons are SO long, that begonias are at their best WAY into late October here, and we can't even THINK about bringing in pansies til mid-October, at the earliest. To let poor begonias, impatiens, caladiums, geraniums suffer in their little pots because it isn't the "season" for them, because some idiot thinks mums in 100 degree August are OKAY, and pansies soon after, is SUCH a shame! Alas, 'tis the way of the world, which is why we get summer clothes in stores in winter and heavy coats in summer.

SusiQ in NE TX

Calliop.

I own a nursery and sell well over 400 verieties both retail and wholesale to area nurseries. Don't think the wife would appreciate me stoping and Lowes and purchasing. But I do glide the isles and spy on the competition.

As other posters have said. It's a marketing tool nothing more or less and nothing to do with the box stores.

Here in coastal California, we also promote Fall planting , and gardeners are becoming more & more aware of the benefits of planting this time of year. We do a big Fall planting Party with 30% off all plants - all new in-house grown 4" stock. ( We are growers- wholesale & retail ) The benefits are this are : Though less profit is generated, it does provide enough to keep our workers employed during the slow months , so we don't have to fire/layoff and retrain new workers each year. Also we attract lots of new shoppers who have lotsa fun at the party, bond to the nursery and return in Spring to buy plenty of full priced plants. Sounds nutty , but it works .

I work for a small landscape company with an even smaller retail nursery and we always have an end of season sale. This has more to do with practicalities than any marketing ploy a la Wal Mart. In our zone it would be very unusual to have 100% survival rate overwintering, so you are taking your chances there. Plus, the more plants you have to overwinter, the more labor you need to get them ready and bed them down at a time when you are not generating any income to pay the labor.
We do however hold back certain plants that are too good for one reason or another to include in the sale.
Also, I might add that as a gardener, I know that fall is an excellent planting time, and that I can get really good deals at 'end of season' sales so I probably buy more now than in the spring.