As I woke this morning I realised that there was sunlight filtering in through the curtains. When I got to work the sun was shining, and I joked with customers about the shock of seeing that big yellow thing looming at us in the sky, and one of them teased me that no, that was the moon.
The owner instructed the manager to rein back on ordering in more plants, given that trade was so quiet and we were already well-stocked. It's a tricky thing to manage. Plants go past their best in pots, in some cases quite quickly, so persuading customers to accept something you do have in stock as a substitute for something that you include in your catalogue but don't have at the moment is a good strategy. The trouble is that customers can be very firm about what they want. Some are knowledgeable plants people, others are simply determined to stick to whatever their designer told them to get. I have some sympathy with them. Even a large garden runs out of space for new plants, especially shrubs and big perennials that take up a fair bit of room, so why should you agree to live for the next decade with a variety that was not the one you really wanted, just to help your local plant centre adjust their stock levels? One of the key pieces of advice from some leading garden writers, like Robin Lane Fox, is to only to grow the best of anything. As to what is the best, well, solving that question brings the priest and the doctor in their long coats running over the fields.
The owner is partly concerned because she doesn't expect the second May Bank Holiday to be very good for trade, with the Diamond Jubilee. If people are busy baking cakes and holding fetes and street parties and special concerts, they won't be spending the weekend doing their gardens. Economic pundits on the radio seem to accept the Jubilee and the Olympics as a feel-good fillip to economic activity, if not a kick-starter for growth. I'm not so sure. I've already decided to boycott London for a couple of months, and here's the owner deciding that on balance the Jubilee jamboree will cost us sales. Hanging up bunting and bonding with the neighbours might be good for social cohesion, but not for the sort of activity that counts towards GDP. Our holding back on orders will in turn hit the small businesses that grow the plants, and so the pain ripples through the part of the rural economy that depends on horticulture. OK, it isn't very big, but it matters to the people who work in it.
Happily, with the sun visible in the sky, the thermometer several degrees above where it has been, and the rain holding off until 3pm, trade was brisker than over the weekend, suggesting that the problem isn't that everybody is now bored of gardening or bankrupt, and given more normal seasonal weather demand might be respectable, if not booming. I'm not too depressed yet. There again, keen gardeners are by nature optimists. If you didn't believe that although things had been rather a shambles this time around, next time they would work much better, you wouldn't bother.
Supposed that office carpet cleaning service doesn’t exist this day and you have hectic schedule would you want to file a leave or find person and pay wages just to do this now that we are all professionals.
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