Potting around

Mum said we needed potting mix and the new Bunnings was open up at Massey, so I resolved to go check it out. I wasn't that keen because last time I went to a Bunnings for potting mix on advice of a friend they had sold out. I also recall the last time I shopped for plants there (at New Lynn) the staff were less than helpful.  Well I couldn't even get in the doors since the carpark was full. 

I carried on down the road. I guess we can get potting mix at Palmer's. Or Mitre 10. Even though I have a Mitre 10 just up the road on Lincoln.  When we got to Palmers it was like a ghost town as it had completely shut up shop. Huh. So I got the potting mix from Mitre 10 instead, which was doing  a roaring trade, and it had plenty of parking, now that Palmers no longer was open. 

So what happened to Palmers? It was a brand new store (opened 2014) although I questioned what a huge store was doing in the middle of nowhere the same with all the other Westgate shops with not a soul for miles around. It had a nice cafe if pricy and half of the shop was devoted to knick knacks like bbqs,  spa pools, designer scarves and kitchen utensils just like every gardener needs to complete their luxury lifestyle. Ha who are they kidding. Real gardeners don't have money, that's why we garden. 

If I know anything about retail it's this - a lot of retail business owners have more money than sense. The investment they put in to their stores hoping to recoup it in sales far outweighs the plain facts of economics like does anyone actually have that much spare money to spend every week to keep them afloat? The people who shop retail simply cannot afford to buy in wholesale the quantities that make the business owners able to purchase those goods in the first place. Certainly one was overwhelmed with choice when entering Palmers Planet. But gardeners want plants and not fancy knick knacks and certainly don't have the space in their ever decreasing urban plots for a spa pool. 

So I made the drive back home, with my Mitre 10 potting mix. Perhaps coronavirus had indeed hit businesses hard and I wondered what had happened to all the plants. If I had owned Palmers I would have desperately planted all my stock if I had known business was closing or given it to community gardens if I was unable to return everything to the nurseries or the other stores. On your approach to the former Palmers you pass by acres of weed infested empty land, when it was operating out in desolate Northwestgate I had hoped it would have somehow transformed the place into some horticultural paradise by proxy but alas the only thing that is there now is an empty concrete barn painted with bright yellow flowers, as a monument to what was, for a brief moment in time, a green oasis in the concrete carpark jungle of bulldozed development.