SIMILAR INDUSTRY - COMPLETELY DIFFERENT VIEW
Garden centre trade votes to Remain
by Service Dealer Editor, Steve Gibbs
You may remember last week I mentioned that our friends at GTN Xtra, the newsletter of Garden Trade News, the magazine for the garden centre trade, asked us if they could run the exact the same EU Referendum survey as we at Service Dealer had a couple of weeks back.
The intention was to compare the opinions of people in industries, which whilst of course different and distinct, could at least be argued to be in vaguely similar ballparks.
The results which we generated from you, our readers, gave us a very definite answer - the majority of Service Dealers wished to Leave. By quite a healthy margin - 56.7% to 43.3% in fact.
If you want to remind yourself, you can see the full Service Dealer results here
Garden Trade News' results though were somewhat different to ours. A clear majority of their readers stated they will be voting for the UK to Remain in the EU in the Referendum on June 23rd.In fact interestingly their results were almost a mirror image of ours with 57% wanting to Remain compared to 43% who wanted to Leave.  Over 200 readers took part in the survey from all parts of the UK and covering suppliers, retailers and other members of the UK garden retailing community.  Regionally, all parts of the UK saw a majority of their respondents in favour of remaining in the EU. However there were larger majorities to stay in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland than in England.     So what conclusions can we draw from this? I'm not sure really. They did their survey a little after ours, so does this imply that nationally the Remain camp is starting to resonate with people a little more than the Leave team? Or was this result reached specifically because of fundamental differences in beliefs between the garden centre trade and the outdoor powered machinery trade? I honestly don't know. What do you think?
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