McShane's Nursery to close

Update: Owner Steve McShane issued a statement on his store's closing in an email, explaining the factors leading to his decision to close. McShane also says that although his retail nursery business will shut down, his landscape supply business will remain in operation.

"This move comes in response to a trend in the industry where customer counts and average sales have dropped over a period of ten years. The hobby of gardening competes with a wide variety of other pastimes and hobbies that are less expensive and easier to get into - largely digital. The poor weather has not helped the situation.

"As I recently shared with a friend, 'customers desire low-maintenance, drought tolerant and low cost landscape solutions for increasingly smaller yards.' That is exactly what McShane's Landscape Supply will focus on moving forward.

"I am a gardener at heart and for more than ten years I gave of my time and talent serving on the boards for the California Association of Nurseries and Garden Centers, American Nursery & Landscape Association & State Nursery Board. A new chapter begins in 2018."

From The Californian: 

After 12 years of serving Salinas-area residents and businesses by providing a wide variety of carefully selected, prime quality nursery plants and home gardening supplies, McShane's Nursery & Landscape Supply, 115 Monterey-Salinas Highway, is closing its doors on Sept. 30.

"I’m in business," owner and Salinas City Council member Steve McShane said. "This is not a hobby. I’ve got to be able to make payroll and pay bills."

McShane has found that harder and harder to do in the past several months. He's thought about this outcome for some time but what convinced him to close the retail nursery part of his business was our cold winter and spring. He recalls one weekend in May, usually a lucrative month for most nurseries, when the temperatures never reached above 60 degrees and customers failed to appear.

Read the rest of this article here.