Ursula Buchan

Hard going

We can all recite the statistics, can’t we? I mean the percentage fall in shopping activity in December, the names of the high street retail businesses that have gone bust or been taken over, the numbers of shopworkers who have lost their jobs.

issue 24 January 2009

We can all recite the statistics, can’t we? I mean the percentage fall in shopping activity in December, the names of the high street retail businesses that have gone bust or been taken over, the numbers of shopworkers who have lost their jobs.

We can all recite the statistics, can’t we? I mean the percentage fall in shopping activity in December, the names of the high street retail businesses that have gone bust or been taken over, the numbers of shopworkers who have lost their jobs. Less well-known to us is what is happening to garden centres and nurseries, despite the fact that they are complex retail operations quite as much as Woolworths or Adams Childrenswear. The reason is that there are few public companies in horticulture; indeed, nearly all garden centres, as well as retail and wholesale nurseries, are classed as small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and many of these are single-site operations.

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