THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, December 8, 1994 TAG: 9412080435
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LON WAGNER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 73 lines
With Christmas trees available at grocery stores, hardware stores and discount department stores, what's a good, old-fashioned Christmas-tree seller supposed to do these days to set himself apart?
Some use the car-selling approach pioneered by Saturn: a flat price and no haggling.
Others chant the corporate mantra of the '90s: quality.
``What people see is they see a couple people making a little bit of money on the tree lots, and they think they can do it,'' said Dave Wexler, who sells trees on Chris Carlesi's tree lots in Norfolk and Virginia Beach. ``With Farm Fresh and Food Lion selling trees, they can't make it.''
Carlesi uses the one-price approach. His lot on Virginia Beach Boulevard this week was stocked with 500 blue spruce trees, each of them priced at $30.
Wexler said that the widespread competition from upstart Christmas-tree lots hasn't seemed to affect Carlesi's business. Carlesi has been selling trees for 30 years and has customers who come back to his lots every year.
Wexler said they were a bit miffed to find a grocery store in the strip mall next to the tree lot selling trees for $9.
Roger Allen, at Foundry United Methodist Church, takes the quality-first sales approach. Foundry's trees are priced slightly higher than those at some other lots, but Allen says they were cut Dec. 1, so ``they're a little fresher, a little greener.''
``We got them a week later this year,'' Allen said. ``I guess the first week they weren't really selling, so they figured: Why have them out here longer and have them go bad sooner.''
The church sells about 600 trees each year, using the sale as its big annual fundraiser. It's Fraser firs go for $41 for a six-foot tree, up to $105 for an 11-foot tree. It's white pines range from $27 to $45.
Most of the trees on lots were selling for a minimum of $25 or $30. To the dismay of the Virginia Department of Agriculture and the Virginia Christmas Tree Growers Association, several of the lot operators said they bought their trees from Pennsylvania or North Carolina growers.
``What a shame,'' said Toni Radler, spokeswoman for the state's agricultural department.
Virginia is the seventh-largest Christmas-tree-growing state, primarily because of wholesale tree growers in the western part of the commonwealth. More than 1.7 million Virginia Christmas trees are harvested each year, which translates to $20 million in annual sales.
Even with some corner tree lots in Virginia selling trees from Pennsylvania, North Carolina, or even Canada, Norm Edwards with the tree growers association said that Virginia growers are on pace to have a record year. Sales are 40 percent above last year's mark, he said.
``I know a lot of the wholesale farms in the mountains have been sold out since Nov. 1,'' Edwards said.
The Department of Agriculture, despite the booming business for Virginia tree growers, urges tree buyers to ask the lot operators where they get their trees. A properly watered Christmas tree should last eight weeks, but some trees have been cut long before Nov. 1.
The Agriculture Department, like Allen at the Methodist church, goes with the quality and freshness sales approach.
``Our pitch is this,'' Radler said. ``Some of these service clubs buy trees from Canada, and they may cut as early as late September or October. Then people wonder why their needles fall off.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color staff photo by Lawrence Jackson
Cynthia and Robert Moll of Virginia Beach examine Christmas trees on
a lot on Virginia Beach Boulevard.
by CNB