Gardeners Supply Goes Down The Tubes, In A Sad American Way

A "Viking funeral" of memorabilia done by former
employees of the late, great Gardener's Supply. 

There's a black charred little spot on my property today. 

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.

Meteorologist Fired For Instagram Blast At Elon Musk: What It Means For Other Meteorologists

Sam Kuffel a Milwaukee television meteorologist, was
fired after she posted on social media criticisms of
Elon Musk after he made gestures that many 
believed to be Nazi salutes. 

A television meteorologist named Sam Kuffel was fired recently from a Wisconsin television station for blasting Elon Musk's gesture during President Trump's inauguration. 

The meteorologists, who had worked at WDJT CBS58 in Milwaukee for more than five years, was canned not long after her rather strident posts. 

I know this is a weather and climate blog, and the only relation to these topics is the fact that a meteorologist was involved, but it's an important topic. So I ought to cover it. 

More importantly, what is the duty of on-air meteorologists to report facts that contradict the Trump administration?   With Trump's climate denial, it's more important than ever for meteorologists to offer true but not sensationalized information on climate change.  Should meteorologists speak up if the Trump administration blunts the expertise and truthfulness from the National Weather Service? How far should meteorologist go to speak truth to power?

Unfortunately, Kuffel, likely unwittingly, chose a not-so-important hill to die on. Sure, Nazi salutes are beyond horrible, and they need to be called out. But we face years of climate denial, anti-science gaslighting that needs to be combated full-throatedly. 

As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, Kuffel posted a picture of Musk doing his thing and wrote "Dude Nazi saluted twice. TWICE. During the inauguration." You (expletive) with this and this man, I don't (expletive) with you. Full stop."

She then posted a GIF from "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia" with a caption. "Screw that old (expletive). He's a Nazi."

Her posts caught the attention of conservative activists, as these things do.  Radio host Dan O'Donnell accused Kuffel of "spreading the lie that Elon Musk was giving a Nazi salute."

To me, it sure looked like a Nazi salute, though Musk's defender said it was just an awkward gesture, not intended to support Nazis. I would have liked a statement from Musk explaining what happened, but he's not one to do that. 

For her part, Kuffel said she "never intended to harm anyone" with those social media posts. "I was just voicing my personal opinion on a private social media account that was not accessible to the general public."

There's actually more moving parts here than you'd think.   Many news organizations have codes of conduct when it comes to social media.  When I worked at the Burlington Free Press until 2013, I already had active social media accounts.

I had to be careful what I posted so as not to make my political opinions known. It was part of our code of conduct, something many news organizations have.  Given the need to not appear biased, journalists need to keep their political opinions close to their chests, even when they're not on the clock. 

"People who aren't bound by journalist codes of ethics can give any opinion they want, and it doesn't have to be nuanced, but it's an opinion....If you're related to a media organization, you have a deeper responsibility to show your math," said Jill Geisler, the Bill Planet Chair in Leadership and Media Integrity and Loyola University Chicago told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel .

It's unclear whether CBS58 had a code of conduct, as it's not displayed on its website. For transparency's sake, many news organizations publish their conduct codes online.

This gets into First Amendment issues, too.  Yes, an employer can fire you for your actions, even if you were not at work when you did them. 

But Musk is now at least nominally part of the federal government. The First Amendment guarantees the right of free speech free of government suppression.  Neither Musk nor anybody in the Trump administration ordered the television station to fire Kuffel.

However, given the current political climate, did the station feel compelled to can the meteorologist, to protect itself from whatever repercussions they might receive from Trump's minions? 

The bottom line is on air meteorologists have more responsibility than ever to tell the truth about everything, even if it touches on politics.

I hear people say meteorologists should exclusively stick to the weather forecast. Just tell us if we need to bring an umbrella today.   But partly sunny with a chance of showers is only part of their job. The meteorologists on your local television stations are also journalists. 

Most of them, I trust, have more than enough integrity to give us the science and climate news with the best information available. 

The Kuffle firing over Musk's likely Nazi salute probably is just a sideshow that has already exhausted its life in today's rapid fire news cycle. 

But it's a signal to us all.  Meteorologists have a responsibility to tell us the truth. And the public has the right to demand it. 

 

  

Some Employers Don't Care If Their Workers Die Of Heatstroke

It appears that some industries really don't care if low wage
workers die in climate change driven, worsening heat waves. 

Yes, I know hot weather is over for the year for pretty much all of the nation, but I'm still stewing big time about a Washington Post article I ran across this past August.  

The headline is infuriating enough: "As Temperatures rise, Industries Fight Heat Safeguards For Workers."

Basically, the gist of the article is this: Many employers don't give a crap if some of their workers die of heat stroke. They figure they can just hire somebody else to replace them. No biggie, apparently.   

The Washington Post article starts out with an introduction to Sandra Ascencia, a South Florida plant nursery worker who once spent a week in the hospital from work-related heat stroke and once saw the body of a coworker in a parking lot, dead from heat stroke. 

WAPO continues: 

"Today, she belongs to a growing group of immigrant laborers in South Florida pushing for what for what many health experts say is the best way to prevent heatstroke as temperatures reach new extremes: A law requiring employers to provide outdoor workers with drinking water, shade and rest breaks on hot days."

Wait, what? Outdoor workers aren't entitled to drinking water, shade and rest breaks on hot days?

Ascencio goes on, as quoted in the Washington Post:

"'We're seeing temperatures above 100 degrees,' said Ascencio, 50. 'We meet workers who tell us bosses don't give them even 10 or 15 minute breaks. They know it's inhumane to work under these conditions but they have to pay their bills.'"

Ascencio is being Captain Obvious here, but you wouldn't know it from many industry leaders who say we shouldn't worry about heat stroke killing workers. My cynical side says some employers figure that workers, many of the POC and immigrants, are just cogs that are easily replaced, kind of like a part that breaks in a machine. To them, these workers aren't really human, so what's the big deal? 

Unless workplace safety rules are finally enacted, all this will keep getting worse. Climate change is making summers hotter and in many cases more humid. It is becoming more and more untenable to work in our worsening heat waves. 

The Washington Post says some states, like California and Washington, have enacted laws to protect workers from heat exposure. But in many other states, attempts to pass similar laws were killed or weakened by industry lobbyists. 

The Biden administration is also enacting rules to protect workers from excessive heat. At last check an OHSA vote on these rules has been delayed several times, so the fate is unknown. 

The rules are needed nationwide. An investigation by NPR and Columbia Journalism Investigations released in the summer of 2021 indicated 384 people in the U.S. died of work-related heat exposure in the last decade. 

This problem is bound to get worse without reforms, as a worsening climate crisis is intensifying and prolonging both extreme heat and humidity.

The reaction from several industries has been beyond callous regarding safety rules for heat. 

Here's some choice WAPO quotes on this, followed of course with my eye roll that can probably be seen from Neptune.

"Victoria Carreon, an administrator at the Nevada Department of Business and Industry, said the agency is in talks with industry groups about the burdens on businesses of having to implement regulations."

Yeah, like it's absolutely impossible for any business to provide enough water or workers and make sure they receive a break in a cool environment every once in awhile.  

Oh, and here's this gem from the National Cotton Council:

"The National Cotton Council wrote that many heat related issues are not caused by farm work or poor management 'but instead result from the modern employee lifestyle in an advanced 21st century global economy.' The group pinned workers' inability to withstand high temperatures on 'present day luxuries such as air conditioning and Americans' sendentary lifestyle.'"

Hear that kiddies? Cotton pickers aren't dying or getting dangerously sick from extreme heat. They're actually a bunch of wusses who are so completely lazy that they seek out air conditioning when they are off work and overheated. The selfishness of those cotton workers! They should be miserable 24/7!  Never mind that heat is dangerous to cotton pickers whether or not they have access to air conditioning during their off hours. 

In Oregon, trade groups for the timber and manufacturing interests are saying that heat rules would regulate "a societal hazard rather than an occupational hazard."

In other words, it's hot. Deal with it. Never mind that the workers in question would not willingly go out and kill themselves in the heat in their off hours. 

 In Virginia, Juley Fulcher, a worker health advocate for nonprofit Public Citizen said she was infuriated when one business representative told her, "If we give them breaks, it costs us money."

Fulcher said her reaction was "If you don't give them breaks, they die and that costs you money, too."

By the way, A United States farm worker is 35 times more likely to die from heat related problems that people toiling in other industries, according to Fast Company and Nexus News Media. Heat is also responsible for 170,000 heat related injuries. 

I'm guessing here that for many of these industries, this has nothing to do with ethics, morals, or humanity. To their minds, keeping employees alive in heat waves is more expensive than disposing of the dead ones and replacing them.  I'm being pretty blunt here, but that's what it seems to boil down to.  

Pretty demonic, but there you go. 

Of course, if we insist on talking just dollars and completely ignore humanity and morality, there is more that should be of interest to the billionaire overlords who want to rake in more dough. 

On NPR's Planet Money, they recently made a good case that workplace heat regulations would actually save industries money. 

David Metz a senior quantitative analyst at the RAND Corporation, laid it out for Planet Money. 

Metz crunched some numbers and concluded work place heat regulations in California would cost industry $100 million a year. Yeah, that is a lot of money but consider that California is a big state.

However, the same businesses that would lose that $100 million through regulation would also save $200 million, mostly through better worker productivity.  Which seems obvious. A worker who isn't about to keel over from the heat will probably do a better job.

As Planet Money explains, worker injuries increase when it's too hot. Decision making and cognition wilt in the heat too. 

So heat regulations in the workplace are a win-win, right?  Then why aren't employers embracing this idea?

Metz theorized businesses this cost/benefit ratio hasn't dawned on the Powers That Be because it just never crossed their minds. Metz charitable toward these managers with this assessment, but I'm a lot more skeptical.

The managers - the bad ones, anyway - never thought about this because they never wanted to. To them, who cares about employee safety?  They just want to make money. 

My whole screed here isn't an indictment of capitalism in general. It's a howl of disgust over the fact that many no longer regard capitalism as a system that at least has the potential to lift all boats. It's instead a game of which billionaire can vacuum up more cash and impoverish and exploit the greatest number of people.

We thought the last Gilded Age in the 1800s was bad enough. In some respects, the current one seems even worse.