How Garden Centers Can Tackle Labor Shortages with Smart Tech
August 24, 2025 If you walk into a garden center during peak season, chances are you’ll notice signs of strain. Maybe a display is left partially set up. Maybe the staff looks overwhelmed — with frantic pleas for help across the radio. Maybe the phone is left off the hook because answering phone calls isn’t an option. These aren’t isolated issues. They’re signs of a deeper, ongoing problem in our industry: the labor shortage.
For years, garden centers have worked around seasonal staffing challenges. But now we’re facing something more permanent. Experienced horticulture professionals are retiring, and fewer young people are entering the field. At the same time, customer expectations continue to rise. Many small businesses are feeling the pressure.
I’ve worked in and around this industry for most of my life. I know how much pride goes into every plant on the shelf and every customer relationship at the counter. That’s why I believe we need to start thinking differently about how we support our teams. Technology isn’t here to replace people. It’s here to help them.
Smart tools can lighten the load. For example, artificial intelligence (AI) can scan your inventory and provide the perfect plant suggestion, given even the most specific criteria. AI can also generate landscape design inspiration, leveraging plants you have in stock, with input from your horticulturists and designers, in 30 seconds. Automation can deliver perfectly timed plant care reminders to your customers’ phones via text — telling them when and how to plant, water, fertilize, and winterize their plants, taking into account species-specific needs. It can pass on that ages-old wisdom and knowledge from your smartest horticulturist(s) to tens of thousands of customers exactly when they want it.
These tools don’t erase human knowledge. They protect it. When long-time team members move on, their routines and plant expertise often go with them. Technology gives us a way to preserve that knowledge and make it available to newer employees in a clear, consistent format. In other words, it helps future-proof your operations.
More garden centers are beginning to explore these kinds of tools, not as a replacement for people, but as a way to better support them. While no technology will greet a customer or design an intricate landscape like a skilled team member can, it can take repetitive, time-consuming tasks off the table so that staff can focus on what they do best.
Of course, I understand the concerns. Ours is a people-first industry built on relationships and trust. No one wants to see that replaced by screens and software. But that’s not what this is about. It’s about giving staff more time to focus on what they do best, working with plants and people at the peak of their expertise, by taking routine tasks off their plate, such as checking inventory.
Labor challenges are not going to disappear. If we want to keep thriving as an industry, we have to think practically about how we operate. Embracing technology is one of the smartest and most accessible ways to support staff, meet customer needs, and grow sustainably.
This doesn’t mean letting go of tradition. It means combining that tradition with tools that make it easier to uphold. The values of care, quality, and expertise remain the same. We just have new ways to deliver on them.
Now is the time to adapt, not to change who we are, but to protect what makes this industry so strong in the first place.
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