Supply chain woes hit Christmas tree lots
Organizers of some Texas Christmas tree lots are concerned about being unable to meet demand this holiday season due to supply chain and environmental issues that have reduced the supply of Christmas trees.
Jami Warner, executive director of the American Christmas Tree Association, said supply chain delays and extreme weather in the Pacific Northwest and Midwest this year have caused price increases for both artificial and real Christmas trees.
“Shop early. If you see something you like, buy it,” Warner said. “This is not the year to wait until the last minute. Christmas is not canceled. There will be real and artificial Christmas trees this season, but it might be harder to find exactly what you want, when you want it and at the price you expected.”
Warner said the association estimates consumers of both real and artificial Christmas trees will see price increases of between 20 percent and 30 percent.
Many artificial trees and ornaments are stuck at sea near congested ports or haven’t shipped yet, Warner said. The association estimates retailers had fewer than half of ordered products by mid-november, when in years prior they would have had about 70 percent of products by then.
Beau Coan, operations manager for Papa Noel Christmas Trees, with six tree lot locations in the Austin area and one in San Antonio, said the industry might be facing shortages because many Christmas tree farmers did not plant trees during the 2008 economic recession, and the trees
can take about 10-12 years to grow. In anticipation of supply issues, Coan said the company boosted inventory with an additional 1,000 trees, sourced from North Carolina, to spread across its lots.
Coan said business was brisk last year, and he expects the same this year.
“Many people were tired of being cooped up. They were stressed, and Christmas, that holiday season, was a time for people to kind of regain some normalcy in their crazy hectic lives,” Coan said.
Papa Noel expects to sell out of trees around Dec. 20, but that could come a few days earlier, he said.
Coan said, like many industries,
inflation is hitting his Christmas tree business significantly, especially with shipping prices.
“We’re just seeing an increase in almost everything across the board, from groceries to closed utilities to the Christmas trees,” Coan said. “It all has come up a little bit.”
Coan said prices primarily will go up about 5 percent to 10 percent for trees taller than 10 feet, which are selling from $279.99 to $339.99, according to its website.
‘Selling faster’ than ever
Aaron Brungot, owner of Brungot Farms in Cedar Park, said despite increasing Christmas tree inventory by 50 percent from last
year, he still expects to sell out of his North Carolina Fraser firs in early December. Currently, the farm is sold out of 11- to 13-foot trees, according to its website.
“They’re selling faster than they’ve ever sold,” Brungot said. “We’re afraid (of the) Black Friday, Saturday, Sunday crowd that’s going to show up just to get trees.”
Brungot said a mixture of population growth and more people looking to buy Christmas trees during the pandemic has led to skyrocketing demand. Christmas tree pre-orders in early November have already quadrupled the farm’s 2019 pre-order sales.
Shipping prices have increased 30 percent and labor 25 percent compared with last year, Brungot said.
Additionally, large tree suppliers are increasingly shifting to direct-to-consumer sales. One of Brungot Farms’ major suppliers dropped the business last year for that reason.
“It’s so many pieces of this puzzle that have been happening, not just the pandemic. The pandemic has just made them worse,” Brungot said. “It’s all of that in a perfect storm.”
Despite the challenges, Brungot Farms will increase price tags for trees taller than 9 feet by about 8 percent with 9- to 10-foot trees selling at $269.95. The farm was able to secure larger orders of trees ranging from 5 to 9 feet that Brungot said allowed the business to stabilize prices.
Shipping costs rise
Beth Walterscheidt, co-owner of Evergreen Farms in Elgin, which sells pre-cut firs from North Carolina and Washington state and grows trees on site for customers to cut down themselves, said the business struggled to find truckers to transport the firs and faced shipping costs from Washington that doubled.
But the farm didn’t run into difficulties with suppliers, and it will offer more than 2,000 to cut down, as usual.
“We expect to have a pretty high demand on (pre-cut trees), so those will probably go pretty fast,” Walterscheidt said.
“There aren’t as many trees as there used to be, mainly because they are replanting and that’s what happens,” Walterscheidt said of Christmas tree inventory nationwide. “It just runs a cycle, and probably in the next couple years there’ll be an overabundance of trees.”