what a shame..years ago at Menards there was a "Free" sign by a few carts of past their prime annuals..when I went to look it was nice to see people happy to get some flowers..nobody was greedy..one woman said to me "here's another pink one" - I was holding a pink one..I called the store and told the manager that I thought it was nice to give them away rather than throw them away..did you call the corporate number for Home Depot?..

HD is rather unusual in that its plant vendors/suppliers will credit the store back for any unsold, damaged or seriously past prime plants. So that means that one will not find plant merchandise for sale below the store cost and that merchandise that must be moved or cleared out seasonally to make room for something else, gets dumped and compacted. It is part of the agreement they have with vendors and it is company wide policy.

Remember that places like HD are not nurseries or garden centers - they are just home improvement mass marketers that sell a few plants as loss leaders.

I am working with a few others to get the conversation going. It includes one or two other readers here and one on another gardening site.

We are going to get together to work with HD who requires a 401c3 business to release over stock like this. It may take a while.

I knew about the policy that Gardengal described..what a waste..

emerogork..admirable to try and rectify the situation..hope you can change it.

The plot thickens....
I spent some time with a manager.

As it is, the general policy for almost all returns is that once you get your money back, they throw out the item rather than send it back to the vendor, The same happens with overstock.

As it is with bulbs, it is the same as with any book store (do they still exist?) concerning paper backs. They throw away the book after they tear off the cover which is what gets sent back to the vendor.

The bags of bulbs have the labels torn off and the contents end up as a pile of loose, generally unidentifiable, bulbs.

It is the down side to the "Economies of Scale" theory.

Yet the conversation continues.....
I will update posts as things change.