A day for dad

In the field of independent garden center management, most of us consider Mother’s Day to be one of the peaks of our sales year in terms of revenue and traffic. With so much emphasis on Mother’s Day in our business, it can be easy to overlook the holiday’s commercial counterpart: Father’s Day. According to the National Retail Federation’s annual Father’s Day survey, planned spending on Father’s Day in the U.S. was expected to reach a record high of $15.5 billion in 2017. Although restaurant outings topped the charts as the most popular gift category for Father’s Day, garden centers shouldn’t ignore the spending in gardening/home improvement supplies ($0.9 billion) and tools/appliances ($0.8 billion) categories.