Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
written by Alan R Hickman

I usually buy toothpaste several tubes at a time so, when the supply ran out recently, I was back on my hands and knees in the pharmacy section of the grocery store. It's been years since I could read a newspaper from five feet away, and the unit prices on store tags are about the same size as the print this column uses; thus, the need for crawling around.

In case you hadn't noticed, on shelves at eye level, toothpaste is two to three dollars per 100ml but at mouse level, it's around a buck. I picked up a couple of 100ml tubes at $1.09 and then noticed some for $0.89. Although the boxes looked about the same size, the unit price was $1.19 per 100 ml. Turned out that the tube in the 'cheap' box contained only 75 ml, not 100 ml.

It happened that I was accompanied by someone who had worked part time at a pharmacy during high school. "Oh yes, " he said. "When we wanted to move product, we'd shelf it at eye level and put the price on yellow labels. Didn't matter what the price was, people bought it."

The effect of product size and placement is well known - eye-level and end-of-isle locations sell the fastest - and large boxes are assumed by careless purchasers to cost less per unit than small boxes, even though they are often priced higher. The attractiveness of the colour yellow to humans is something I hadn't consciously appreciated, but it is obvious once it is pointed out. Yellow just screams 'Buy me, buy ME!"

The really funny thing is that yellow is also the preferred colour for many annoying insects. Greenhouses are often festooned with yellow sticky strips covered with imprudent white flies, gnats and sundry flying pests.

As we approach the silly season for gardeners, it is as well to remember that garden centres and nurseries exist for the purpose of selling but, unlike grocery stores, they only have a few weeks to do a year's worth of business. Where grocery stores can boost profits a few cents here and a few cents there, seasonal enterprises can only survive by making money big and fast.

There are two ways for a business to increase sales: one is to get more customers and the other is to get the customers they already have to buy more product. The second tactic has worked so well for food retailers that 60% of shoppers are now overweight or obese.

Plant sellers do their bit by making sure that there are always lots of carts and trolleys close at hand, so that customers are not limited by what they can carry around, and the wagons are nice and big so that a flat of pansies and one rose bush will look really lonely.

In the warmth and shelter of a greenhouse, the season can be a month or more ahead of the surrounding area, so, for maximum impulse purchase appeal, it is possible to have spring flowering and summer flowering plants all in bloom by early May when most people start itching to plant something.

Of course, a prudent gardener would have bought the spring blooming perennials the previous fall, so they would bloom in the garden and not on the greenhouse bench, and the summer blooming perennials would have been planted as soon as the ground was workable, in April or late March while the plants were still dormant, but retailers make their profits by catering to the mass market, not to what knowledgeable gardeners would do.

Patenting and plant branding are becoming popular ways for plant breeders and marketers to profit from their activities. Most anything sold which carries a patent number or a brand name has a royalty built into the price.

On the one hand, it is reasonable that the sellers benefit from their years of plant breeding and the millions of dollars spent in advertising. On the other hand, a gardener needs to ask whether the newest latest patented pink pulmonaria, with a registered name and brand, will look that much different in the garden from a none-branded less expensive selection.

One only has to skim through a nursery catalogue to realize that the real money is to be made not in selling plants but in selling 'accessories'.

Fertilizers and soil conditioners are the gifts to garden centres which just keep on giving. If the soil in a flower bed is regularly dressed with household compost, if it is well mulched and if care has been taken to get the mechanical properties of the soil correct, then it is unlikely that additional nutrients will ever be needed.

The soil certainly won't need bales of peat moss, shredded coconut husk, bags of clay buster or any of the other expensive 'amendments' that people are induced to dump on their gardens every year.

For most home gardeners, a basic tool kit would be a good border fork, an inexpensive spade and shovel, and perhaps a decent spring-back rake. As a treat, add a hi-end bypass-pruner, with a belt holster to put it in, and a diamond hone to keep it sharp.

The problem is that once the basic kit has been acquired, it will last a lifetime and there is no more profit for anyone to make. Thus we have all the gimmicky weed puller, the odd looking hoes and hooks and trowels and seed planters and self-watering devices and on and on. All pretty much useless, but great 'as seen on TV' sellers. For demonstration at the teaching garden classes, we have a collection of useless but expensive gardening gimmicks, and the number grows every year as people donate their latest 'looks like a good idea' purchases that turned out to be more trouble than they were worth.

High Temperature:
Actual: 20°C partly sunny Wind E9km/h P.O.P.2%
Average: 21°C
Record: 33°C in 1987

Low Temperature:
Actual: 12°C partly cloudy Wind N6km/h P.O.P.26%
Average: 9°C
Record: -1°C in 1949