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.

Heat Waves Are The "Neutron Bomb" Of Weather Disasters

Heat waves are the neutron bomb of weather disasters.
They don't cause much damage, but they are the 
biggest weather killer out there.e 

 The big heat wave that's expected to build the eastern United States - including Vermont - and southeastern Canada is already being described as "dangerous" and "deadly" 

For good reason.

Heat waves are indeed deadly and dangerous, which is why the weather community makes a big deal out of warning the public often dismisses  as "just some hot days, it's summer."

Heat waves are the neutron bomb of weather disasters. Unlike hurricanes, tornadoes and floods, hot weather doesn't cause a lot of property damage. Oh sure, some concrete heaves on a highway here, a railroad track bends a little. 

But heat waves don't provide the super dramatic images that attract eyeballs and clicks to social media and new sites.

What heat waves lack in photogenic destruction the sadly more than make up for in deaths. Some of the worst weather disasters in recent history have been heat waves. That's why I liken this to a neutron bomb, those infamous weapons that kill lots and lots of people but generally leave buildings and infrastructure intact. 

A recent Associated Press analysis shows that 2,300 Americans died from hot weather during 2023. This number greatly exceeded the toll in more famous big heat waves in 1980 and 1995

Climate change is making heat waves worse, and spreading them into areas that historically haven't been greatly bothered by such weather. New York saw 18 heat related deaths in 2023. Wisconsin had 14 and Washington State had 11. 

In states where fewer than 10 deaths were reported, data is suppressed for privacy reasons. Vermont is one of those states. Last year, Vermont had somewhere between one and nine heat-related deaths. 

In 2018, just one intense July heat wave killed six people in the Green Mountain State. In the past few decades the only weather event that caused more deaths in Vermont as the flooding from Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, which claimed seven lives. Last summer's catastrophic floods killed two Vermonters. 

Reporting heat deaths is complicated and climate change is certainly not the only reason for the spike in such casualties. 

As the Associated Press reports:  "Deaths are also up because of better reporting and because Americans are getting older and more vulnerable to heat.... The population is also slowly shifting to cities, which are more exposed to heat."

Societal ills are also combining with climate change to kill more people in hot weather. Last year, heat killed 874 people in Arizona, 645 of them in Maricopa County, which is basically metropolitan Phoenix. 

As the AP tells us:

"People were dying in their cars and especially on the streets, where homelessness, drug abuse and mental illness make matters worse. 'In the last five years, we are seeing this consistent and record kid of unprecedented upward trend. And i think it's because the levels of heat that we have seen the last several year have exceeded what we have seen in the last 20 or 30, said (Dr. John) Balbus, the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity at the Department of Human Services."

In other words, the heat is getting worse with climate change in conjunction with a fraying American social net. 

As horrible as the American death toll has been and will be from heat, we have seen some terrible rounds of casualties from hot weather in recent decades.

Analysts tell us some 62,000 Europeans died of heat-related causes in the summer of 2022, which was the continent's hottest on record.  That number was arrived at by comparing how many people died in the summer of 2022 compared to "normal" weather summers. 

An August, 2003  heat wave in France caused another 15,000 deaths.   Another heat wave in Russia back in 2010 caused 55,000 deaths.

Unfortunately, it's inevitable that some people will pass a way in the heat wave beginning engulf the Northeast. We just hope enough people take precautions and find places to stay cool so it won't be that bad. 

Chile Wildfires Among Most Deadly In Recent Years; Part Of Disturbing Climate Trend

A large neighborhood destroyed by deadly wildfires in
Chile over the past week. 

 The death toll from wildfires in Chile had risen to at least 130 as of Tuesday afternoon as the blazes tore through some densely populated areas in the middle of the South American nation.  

The fires in Chile's Valparaiso region has also left hundreds of people missing and destroyed thousands of homes. 

The fires are likely the deadliest in Chilean history. I'm surprised this calamity hasn't been in the news more than it has. 

Reports BBC:

"President Gabriel Boric said the blaze was 'the worst catastrophe to hit the country since the earthquake of 27 February 2010,'  in which more than 500 people died."

At least 15,000 homes have been damaged or destroyed. Whole neighborhoods are gone. The fires spread so fast amid strong winds that many people had no time to flee, which is why there's such a high death toll.

And it is high, by any measure.  

Says Yale Climate Connections: 

"According to statistics from EM-DAT, the international disaster database, this makes the fires the fifth deadliest worldwide since 1900."

There's been a disturbing increase in wildfire deaths in the past decade or so. With this Chilean fire, five of the top ten deadliest wildfires since 1900 have occurred since 2018. Only two of the top 10 deadliest fires hit before 1987. 

You can't help but wonder if climate change is a part of this trend. Of course, more and more people are living in the urban/wildlands interface, where development impinges on sometimes dangerously dry forests. So that's a big part of the issue and the danger. 

Climate change is making some droughts more likely and more intense. This seems to be the case for Chile, with is suffering through what is probably an unprecedented mega-drought. 

According to Yale Climate Connections:

"The fires were stoked by near-record warm temperatures that have affected central Chile in recent weeks, with temperatures up to 42.9 Celsius (109°F). The accompanying lack of rainfall has created extreme drought and very dangerous fire conditions. 

These conditions came on top of the Central Chile megadrought that began in 2010 - the region' longest drought in at least 1,000 years. The drought has brought precipitation 25-45 percent below average, lowering reservoirs and causing tensions and social unrest over water availability."

The tensions and social unrest that the climate crisis encourages is especially disturbing to me, as you might have gathered from some of my previous posts. 

By the way, there have also been destructive fires in Columbia. And the Amazon basin is in drought. Studies indicate the Amazon drought was caused more by climate change than El Nino, which is also contributing to the problem. 

 Yes, the droughts and storms and other disasters brought on by climate change are bad enough as they directly end or ruin lives.

These increased and intensified disasters help create large scale economic turmoil, and political unrest as governments find themselves either unable or unwilling to help the populations affected by these disaster.

This spills over into other nations.  The United States border crisis is driven by poverty mixed with political chaos and violence in other nations. Climate change is likely a still small but growing part of that chaos and violence.

To say the least, the United States is not handling our border issues well at all. Politics over actual problem solving, apparently. 

We - and the rest of the world - need to get their act together. Otherwise, everything is just going to keep getting worse. Even for those of us left unscathed by the direct consequences of climate change. 

 

Should Vermont Prepare For An Influx Of Climate Refugees?

Aerial view of Interstate 89, Exit 12, Taft Corners, Williston,
Vermont as it looked in 1975. The area is now essentially a 
mini-city. Williston and the rest of Vermont might see
more rapid population growth soon due to 
"climate refugees" fleeing vulnerable parts of the U.S 

We're seeing one mega-disaster weather after another, almost all of which were worsened by climate change.  

Will this trigger a new great migration of people fleeing vulnerable areas?  

And if that happens, will Vermont be part of the receiving end of this big migration?

Experts are warning that residents of western and southern states, faced with extreme drought, wildfires, water shortages, big storms, hurricanes and sea level rise, will soon start to swarm toward "safer" places in the United States.

One projection by Matthew Hauer, an assistant professor of sociology at Florida State University suggests 13.1 million Americans will relocate because of sea level rise along by 2100, based on projections that seas along the U.S. coast will rise by nearly six feet by then.  

Where will all these people go?  Apparently, mostly north and east.  To the Midwest and the interior Northeast. Vermont is looking like one of the more desirable landing spots for these migrants. There's lots of reasons why. 

Vermont is one place where we don't need to worry about sea level rise. At least not directly.  The Green Mountain State is regarded a "safe" place from climate change.  Sure, we're affected by global warming in the form of worse flooding, periodic droughts, stronger, weirder storms, hotter summers and iffier winters. 

But we tend to avoid the worst of it all. The summer heat waves aren't all that bad, compared to other areas of the nation. We don't often experience hurricanes.  Big wildfires are exceedingly rare. Droughts tend not to be as punishing as in the South and West. 

Vermont is such a Goldilocks state for climate change avoidance that a detailed study by ProPublic and New York Times in 2021 listed the "safest "counties in the United States in terms of threats from climate change. Six of the top ten safest counties were in Vermont. 

I still don't know whether that's true, but it does make sound Vermont enticing, doesn't it? Certainly, most of the 13.1 million sea level/climate refugees won't come to Vermont. But some of them might.  A small percentage of those refugees would certainly swell our population far beyond the current 625,000 or so. 

It's easier than ever to pull up roots and move. Most people need a job, and we don't have millions of employment opportunities here in Vermont. However, the pandemic demonstrated that it's often surprisingly easy to work from home, or from anywhere as long as you have a decent internet connection.    Want to live in Vermont but your job is in California? No problem! You can do both! 

On one hand, this is good.  We have an aging population in the Green Mountain State, and we need relatively young, educated people here to boost our work force and our economy. We even have an incentive program that pays younger working families to move to Vermont to start new careers and lives. 

However, plenty of roadblocks get in the way of a potential booming population.  There's virtually no affordable housing around here. Or infrastructure, really. Plus, our population has been relatively stable for a century now. Vermont's population is less than double of that of 1900. Other states have grown exponentially.

We're accustomed to slow growth.  What if our population begins to grow rapidly?

We cherish our rural atmosphere. Our little farms, undeveloped forests, our lack of crowds.  We like our small and quirky state.  Will we adjust to many more arrivals if forced to? 

There's already resistance. Vermonters understandably cling to the small scale patterns of towns, populations, roads, you name it. We're not enamored by high rise buildings, super freeways, or endless sprawls of apartment blocks, "honky tonks, Dairy Queens and 7-11's," to quote an old Talking Heads song.  

Sprawl has long been a dirty word in Vermont. If we do receive an influx of climate change refugees, we will have to build more densely in existing town centers, and build upward. Meaning something akin to high rises. 

I can't imagine (at least not yet!) a Vermont with 30, 40, or 50 story towers.  Currently, the tallest building in Vermont is Decker Towers in Burlington, at a mere 11 floors, or 124 feet tall. Vermont has the distinction of having the shortest tallest building in the United States, if that makes any sense. 

By the looks of things, Vermont is going to have a hard time building anything remotely as tall as Decker Towers. Here's just one example, courtesy of VTDigger:

Busy Taft Corners in Williston is going through another rezoning effort.

Part of the change involves building heights. Currently, the tallest building you can construct there is 52 feet - about four stories.  Town officials wanted to raise the Taft Corners building height limit to 110 feet. That's about eight stories, so not gigantic. 

The town selectboard got so much blowback from that idea that they lowered the proposed height limit to 87 feet, or about six stories. That's still way too high for many people in Williston.  VTDigger quoted one resident:  "I just don't want to see a tall building in the middle of Williston, period. You know, it's a small town. It is a town. It's not a city."

Like it or not, the Taft Corners area of Williston has become a defacto small city.  This isn't the only building height fight we've had recently. Burlington saw huge opposition back in 2015 to a proposal to build two 14-story towers in the city's downtown.

It's either taller buildings or much more intense sprawl in Vermont if people flee to the relative safety of the Green Mountain State. One way or another, we'll have to choose. 

Vermont is already losing about 14,500 acres per year to residential development. (All of last summer, I heard the hammers and equipment for new houses going up in a formerly forested area less than a mile from my St. Albans house).

Building heights and sprawl are just two issues among many.  We'd have to think about things large and small. School size and budgets, taxes, affordable housing, infrastructure, broadband, land use, job creation,  cultural shifts. It goes on and on. 

Societal issues arise, too. Things that are really hard to talk about, but need to be confronted. Vermont is among the whitest states in the nation. We have a reputation for tolerance, but we have our share of racist, homophobes, Christian nationalists and other creepy people living here. 

A fair number of climate refugees that eventually arrive here will be Black, or of Hispanic, Asian or Arabic descent. How well will Vermont do as its racial diversity changes? I can only hope the resurgence of racism and xenophobia in the United States doesn't intensify further nationally and here in Vermont.   

We have slightly less but still real conflict points too.  Many Vermonters still dismissively refer to newcomers as "flatlanders" who supposedly don't fit in or bring their "problematic" ways of life to the Green Mountain State. 

It'll probably be best to welcome climate refugees if we get them, since it's starting to look almost inevitable. Other locations are largely supporting what is already starting to be an influx. 

In April, Tulane University associate professor of real estate Jesse Keenan provided CNBC a list of American cities that would be great "climate havens." In addition to Burlington, Vermont, Keenan listed cities like Buffalo and Rochester, New York, Asheville, North Carolina, Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Duluth, Minnesota, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Detroit, Michigan. 

Several of these are rust belt cities that fell on hard times during the later half of the 20th century. This might, for these communities, a bit of a resurgence and recovery. 

Buffalo, New York is already promoting itself as a climate refuge city. This city of screaming, blinding lake effect blizzards is actually regarded as among the safest from weather and climate disasters. 

Wildfires and hurricanes tend not to hit Buffalo. Heat waves are actually the leading cause of weather-related fatalities. Buffalo does get heat waves, but less so than many areas of the nation. Plus, Lake Erie tends to temper the worst of the heat waves. Bonus: Lake Erie has plenty of fresh water, so droughts are not that big a problem.

Also, there's room in Buffalo for an influx of people. As Fast Company notes, Buffalo's population was around a half million in the 1950s and is now about half that. 

Buffalo is also boosting affordable housing and bolstering its infrastructure for a climate refugee wave that has already started.    Roughly 3,000 Puerto Ricans moved to the Buffalo metro area to start new lives after Hurricane Maria ravaged the island. 

Fast Company does raise a risk that climate refugees can create in Buffalo, and anywhere else, including Vermont: Climate gentrification. Says the Fast Company article:

"'Think about the first people who are going to start migrating because of climate,' says Ryan McPherson, chief sustainability officer at the University of Buffalo. 'Those are not going to be poor people, right? Those are going to be people with resources. And so, we have to make sure that as we think about planning and making Buffalo ready for climate migration that we do that in a way that is very equitable and fair."

Wealth inequity is another important factor that we'll need to consider.  We already have an extreme dearth of affordable housing. Plus, people with wealth tend to get their way, at least more than people of more modest means. The more well-heeled could potentially crowd out people of more modest means.

Sure, we'll need to welcome climate refugees when the time comes, but we 'll need the backbone and morals to take Buffalo's pledge: Make it fair to everybody, not just the folks with lots of cash lying around.  We can't just let the wealthy drop in and snap up all the housing and land. There's got to be some fairness involved. 

Vermont is already starting to see the first few climate refugees. For instance, at least three families fled Paradise, California after the town was destroyed by a 2018 wildfire and ended up in the Green Mountain State. 

For instance the Boston Globe profiled the Holden family, who lost everything to the Paradise fire, and subsequently moved to "safer" Proctor, Vermont to start a new life.  They did a lot of research, including watching YouTube videos of the horrible 2011 tropical storm Irene flooding.  They were relieved that the Proctor/Rutland area, while damaged by the flood, was mostly intact after the disaster, unlike Paradise, California.  

And the house they purchased did not suffer any flood damage from Irene. 

The current small influx of people is manageable, and judging from the Globe article, the Holdens seem to be settling in just fine in Proctor. 

However climate change and its effects on human behavior often hit in sudden and surprising ways. Good, smart people in Vermont  are beginning to at least think about how to deal with this potential influx of people.

As WCAX-TV reported last year, we need to do a lot more to prepare for this possible influx: 

"UVM Professor of Community Development and Applied Economics Chris Koliba says from a social and economic standpoint, Vermont probably isn't ready to take in more people."

Koliba's remarks to WCAX in December, 2021 are not doubt just as true now. 

Note that we had a bit of an influx of people during the early months of the Covid pandemic, and that made the state's housing shortage worse, and strained schools and infrastructure to at least some extent.

The potential influx of climate refugees to Vermont does not at all have to be a bad thing. As Seven Days reported in January, these newcomers can inject the state's economy with new jobs and commerce, rescue flagging local schools and expand Vermont's tax base. 

As Seven Days notes, as long as we plan soberly, and welcome people of all income types, especially the squeezed middle class, and keep our rural character, we can reap the economic benefits. This could easily be a win for Vermont. Which sounds harsh, since climate change is such a loss.  " 

As for me, I'm absolutely for welcoming people to Vermont.  But we have to do it right and well. There won't be any do-overs.