The economic pressures facing garden centres. Higher borrowing costs. More expensive labour. Higher energy costs. Increased taxation. Post-Brexit trading friction. More cautious consumer spending. Increasingly unpredictable weather. Nobody operating a garden centre, manufacturing products for the sector or supplying it needs convincing that these pressures are real. And there is an important warning contained within the analysis: there is now very little margin for error. But perhaps that should lead us to ask a different question. How much management time should businesses spend concentrating on problems they cannot solve? A garden centre cannot change interest rates. It cannot rewrite corporation tax. It cannot renegotiate the UK's trading relationship with Europe. It cannot control wage legislation. And however much the industry might like to, it certainly cannot control the weather. These things have to be planned for, mitigated and managed. But they cannot become the strategy. Because while the industry has been dealing with those headwinds, something else has happened that is arguably much more important to its long-term future. The consumer changed. And unlike interest rates or the weather, that is something garden centres and their suppliers can respond to. https://bit.ly/SOForesightTrends-GardenCentreFuture