Lawn and garden equipment and supplies retailers

Two unlike shops share this code. The garden centre is the one people want to open, and what is attractive about it is real: plant knowledge and locally grown stock are things a big box does badly, and the customer will pay for both. The cut is the calendar. The only Canadian operating data found — a 2010 trade-magazine reader survey, small and self-selected — has 45% of a garden centre's sales landing between March and May and 7% in winter, with 27% of respondents reporting margins of 1–4% and another fifth answering 'Profit? Are you kidding me?' [C]. A year of fixed cost — land near enough to households to draw them, greenhouses, heat, a core staff — is carried on roughly ten spring weekends, in perishable stock, against weather; and in those same weeks every grocer and home centre sets up a parking-lot tent selling bedding plants at or near cost. The survivors are overwhelmingly families that already own the land and often grow their own stock — which is to say the business works once the capital is sunk and written off, and not before. The outdoor power equipment dealer runs on different rails: the right to sell a major line is granted dealer by dealer by the manufacturer, and the service bay rather than the showroom earns the living. That half was not examined beyond noting it, and it sits closer to the landscaping-contractor trade already screened at 561730 than to retail. The dealer ERP on this branch is screened separately.