Arturo Padilla, right, reaches for a noble fir tree at Linda Maplethorpe’s Christmas tree lot at Craig Road and Rancho Drive. Louis Baughman, Maplethorpe’s father, opened his first tree lot at Bonanza Road and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in 1947, she said.
Saturday, Dec. 4, 2010 | 2 a.m.
"Some people think you go up in the hills and cut down these trees. They're grown on a farm like tomato plants," says Linda Maplethorpe, owner of Frosty's Christmas Trees in Las Vegas.
The mom-and-pop businesses that sprout up this time of year to sell one of the traditional staples of the holiday season — Christmas trees — are hoping that after two years of drooping sales, the green will return to the evergreens this month.
Linda Maplethorpe, for one, is optimistic about sales at three Frosty’s Christmas Trees locations this month after having closed one of her lots the previous two years.
Her father got the family into the business in 1947, and she grew up selling trees every Christmas season.
“It’s in my blood,” said Maplethorpe, who relies on tree sales to supplement her other investments.
She said tree revenue dropped by 20 percent in each of the previous two years as the region reeled from the recession and she had to cut her prices to compete against big-box retailers.
There’s more to the business than just wrangling trees (Maplethorpe owns a tree farm in Oregon). In addition to renting a lot — figure $10,000 — are the costs of hiring salespeople, insurance, fencing, lighting, a power generator, tents and the various government business permits as well as paying state sales taxes upfront.
The complaint about having to compete with the big-box stores is shared by Rob Lambert, who owns five tree lots in town under the banner Stu Miller’s Christmas Trees.
Lambert also operates 20 tree lots in Southern California, where he says independent tree sellers do better because there are fewer empty lots to fill with trees and seemingly fewer box stores to compete against, compared with the Las Vegas Valley.
But there’s an even bigger threat to his business, Lambert says: the dastardly artificial tree, which cost more but can serve Santa for years.
Those plastic trees, coupled with increased government fees, are taking the joy out of Lambert’s selling season.
“If you look at the past to determine the future, you’d say this industry isn’t going to be around because of artificial trees and government regulations,” Lambert said. “The (permit) fees are three, four and five times more than they used to be.”
Which is to say, his business is being sapped.
A longer version of this story appears in the current issue of In Business Las Vegas, a sister publication of the Sun.
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