The Christmas Tree Gamble
Rob Clark sat in the tiny travel trailer on the corner of Sprague Avenue and McDonald Road, apologizing about his sap-stained clothes and talking about a new product called the Cheney Chair Bath Lift.
It’s a device, the 26-year-old Valley man said, used to help the elderly and handicapped get in and out of the bathtub. He helped design it because many of his own family members have health problems. Now he manufactures it and sells it nationally.
When he’s not selling Christmas trees, that is.
His story surprised me. Then again, who did I expect to find peddling trees on Valley corners? Itinerant opportunists? Loners? Mountain men?
Actually, the people who run the Valley’s Christmas tree lots are more likely to be local dentists, police officers and entrepreneurs.
It’s a trend vendors have seen coming for several years.
“Ten years ago, $10,000 would put you in the tree service,” said Charlie Scarano, a third-generation Christmas tree salesman who specializes in “flocking,” the fake snow that turns Christmas trees white, pink or garish purple.
Today, the Valley tree vendor said, setting up a tree lot is a $40,000 investment. And a huge gamble.
It’s harder for those on the fringe to make it. Small-time and nonlocal operators - even those known for camping out year after year in the same Valley spots - are becoming scarce. No one is sure where they’ve gone or if they’re even selling trees anymore.
But they’re not selling on East Sprague.
Of the 14 tree lots that sprouted along the busy Valley corridor last year, just a handful have returned. Most of the survivors are well-established, and owned by locals.
And most are expecting a profitable Christmas.
“Last year, a lot of people lost money,” said Emory Clark, who got into the business at age 14 when he borrowed his brother’s truck, filled it with fresh Idaho firs and made a $100 profit his first day.
Today he runs Clarkstone International Corp., a company that develops and markets new inventions. He also runs Storybook Christmas Trees at the University City Mall.
He does it, he says, because selling Christmas trees is “magic.”
The smell of the cut trees. The smiles on the faces of children.
“My kids grew up helping me harvest trees,” he said. “They learned that it’s fun to work.”
But it’s not fun to send more than 400 leftover trees to the chipper at the end of the season, as Scarano did last year.
“Some years you’re better off to stay home and watch TV,” said Scarano, who spent years working at a Montana veterinary clinic 11 months of the year and selling Christmas trees with his parents in the Valley during December. He now lives in Spokane and will start a job next month with the Washington State Patrol.
But he won’t give up his Christmas tree business.
This year, he set up shop in the former Big O Tire location at 14909 E. Sprague. Inside, he’s created a forest of multi-colored flocked trees. Outside, rows of freshly cut grand and Douglas firs - some as tall as 13 feet - wait to be adopted.
The lot, he said, is not part of the real world. The people who come here are happy - not in crisis. Their demands are usually doable. And occasionally strange.
They’ll want a black-flocked tree. Or a sherbert-flocked tree with alternating orange and white. Or this year’s most popular: the pink tree.
And many customers are surprisingly loyal.
If a new store sprouts up and displaces their favorite tree vendor, they’ll drive around the Valley searching for him.
“They come in and it’s like they’re a long-lost friend,” said Scarano, who hauled in more than 400 trees from Bonners Ferry on Thursday morning.
One day earlier, Rob Clark unloaded 900 trees from Shelton. Clark is hopeful he’ll be able to place most of them in good homes by Sunday.
“You meet a lot of people,” the young inventor said, yawning from the exhaustion of unloading hundreds of trees in four hours. The business day was just beginning, but Clark remained upbeat.
“That’s the best thing about this job,” he said. “It’s hard to find anybody in a bad mood.”