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| A "Viking funeral" of memorabilia done by former employees of the late, great Gardener's Supply. |
That's where on Sunday, myself and former coworkers and current friends burned some memorabilia from a now former Vermont company called Gardener's Supply. I'll tell you why, but first some disclaimers.
I'll admit this post is a little off topic from what you're used to here, but it's important. It's about how corporate American ruins a good thing, time after time.
Create monopolies, concentrate wealth to just a few people and corporations. Those few win, and everybody else loses.
This is a relatively small story that echoes the biggest ones. And it's personal.
After 12 years at Gardener's Supply, I and nearly 60 people were let go. A series of poor management decisions led to a bankruptcy, which led to a takeover by an outfit called Gardens Alive!
And yes, they have that obnoxious exclamation point in their name.
Gardens Alive (screw the exclamation point) has been gobbling up smaller garden entities like Breck's Gurney Seeds, Henry Field's Michigan Bulb, Spring Hill Nursery and Zalenka Farms.
It's the familiar tale of one company vacuuming as many competitors as they can. It happens all the time now. You get these little monopolies that give the consumer fewer choices, worse customer service, and often higher prices. You can do that if you wipe out the competition.
The buyups, either by Gardens Alive or any other big firm which buys up, I don't know, all the widget factories in the world, are all done with cold efficiency.
That type of thing affects all of us. If you look at the bigger picture, the concentration of business, money, our very culture into the hands of a few billionaires and millionaires and entities leaves us all with fewer choices, less freedom. It increases the income inequality that also leads to less stability in the world, less fairness, and plenty of unrest.
Yes, I'm sounding a bit like Bernie Sanders, who's always sounding off on the growing gap between the few haves and the very many have nots, but the dude has a point.
This isn't a pity party for me. I'll be fine. I'll figure it out. I hope everyone else I worked with does.
GARDENER'S SUPPLY
I landed at Gardener's Supplyin 2013, after the first big corporate F.U. I've experienced in my lifetime.
The once great Burlington Free Press the big local paper in Vermont, was desiccated over time to basically nothing by the corporate overlords at Gannett, which owned the paper and hundreds of others. Gannet bled these local news sources dry, leaving "news deserts" across the nation and leaving the public more open all kinds of misinformation from dubious sources. All in the name of making their top top-tier shareholders happy.
The layoffs kept coming, and in August of 2013, I was unceremoniously dumped by Gannett. It was just as well. The work environment had become toxic. As I drove away from that layoff, Billy Joel's "Say Goodbye To Hollywood" came on the radio. It fit.
Stung by the bad experience, and unlike many of my great colleagues and friends from the Free Press, I largely left journalism. I kept my writing brain going by writing this blog and doing a few side projects, but that's it.
Instead, I found refuge at Gardeners Supply. The atmosphere at the employee-owned company was the opposite of toxic. Sure, you had to work hard. Sure, there were bad days. But many good ones, too. everybody was in it together. You made friends. You grew. The lack of toxicity was refreshing to say the least.
The work slogan was People, planet profits. Not just profits. All three.
Gardener's Supply was never spectacularly profitable, as far as I could tell, but it did OK. I think. Until 2020, when things really started to go off the rails.
The biggest of all the big bad conglomerates - Amazon - was hitting us hard. We tried to play with them, selling on their marketplace. I'm not sure how that went.
The pandemic in 2020 created a gardening boom, and a bust that we didn't handle all that well. After every boom comes a bust. The decision makers at Gardener's didn't plan that out well, at least I think i my 20/20 hind sight.
We made a series of bad decisions on systems upgrades, sales philosophy and other issues. Chapter 11 became inevitable, and it hit this year.
The process and Gardens Alive moved in for the kill with that cold efficiency I've already mentioned. The stock we employees accumulated as employee-owners evaporated.
The announcement that we were being laid off came in a brief Zoom meeting. No severance. No support, Just a message that essentially told us, "get lost, suckers."
This after we were told after the takeover, it would be business as usual. So they gave us false assurances during a time we could have been preparing for our next chapters, instead of getting hoodwinked.
Human beings are just part of the machinery. Why run an "expensive" older model when you get get slick plastic version to do the work over in India or somewhere? I get it, businesses are not charities. The workforce has to grow or shrink with what the current conditions allow. But this whole thing smells bad.
Gardens Alive is getting rid of a crew that bent over backwards for customer service while at the same time not giving away the store. We are all gardeners, so we know how to solve customer's problems and steer people to the products that will actually work
I imagine that according to some algorithm, that's not as profitable as having some unfortunate person at a call center in India try to help a customer battle some strange bug called aphids in a mysterious land called Iowa.
So, the bunch of us laid off from Gardeners gathered in my backyard on an atrociously hot Vermont Sunday to hug each other, and have our cathartic Viking funeral at a small backyard campfire I set.
Productivity sheets that measured how good we were with customers, into the fire. Instructions on how to manage the latest, non-working ordering system? Into the flames. Name tags, old catalogs, congratulations on your tenth anniversary paperwork, various instruction manuals on how to manage creaky ordering systems. All up in flames.
There's still some decent local, honorable businesses around. Cherish them, the ones that treat you honestly, are part of the community they serve, that are invested in both their own profits and you, the customer..
Come to think of it, this column is a bit on point for this here blog thingy after all. The stuff I've reported on, the cutbacks at the National Weather Service and FEMA, the concerted effort by Trump and his minions to regard climate change as a hoax, is all about greed, protecting the big wigs from any change in circumstances that can threaten their billions.
So, I'm deciding what to do. If anyone wants to hire an old Vermont weather geek, or has side gigs for me, let me know. (Hey, I'm not above a little self-promotion here).
If anyone does want to pay me to do their gardens, write their copy, do an article, whatever, I promise you one thing: I'm not going to sell out to some billionaire who doesn't care about you.
Like my friends from Gardener's Supply, I actually care about where I live.
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