We buy a lot of Christmas trees (Update)
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Happy holidays, everybody uh IT is that time of year again? And if you're still hoping to nab a Christmas tree, well best of luck I guess coming up um we have a planet money Christmas tae in which Robert Smith and nick fountain get to the root of what is happening in the Christmas tree market this episode originally aired in twenty twenty stay tuned for real update at the very end .

here's the epo .

de Christa tree Christmas tree.

Christmas tree yeah like .

that money Christmas tree the day after thanksgiving. Nick, you and I participated in a grand american tradition trying to make a buck off a religious holiday.

You guys need a Christmas tree. Rima, look, that beauty right there.

Planet money.

Christmas trees. We had a pickup truck filled with Christmas trees, a few signs on a corner in a fancy broke in neighborhood. And we were ready to make some cash, which is the Christmas tree go for, where asking for hundred, fifty thousand.

And people are actually paying one hundred and fifty dollars. No, no, they are not not a single why we still have a truck for the trees. So you trying to do people into buying two expensive Christmas tree es, is that what's going on?

I don't think it's doing. It's seen what the market will bear.

okay? In the market so far has born nothing. He was right. We were striking what was IT where our Prices do high with our sales pitch off. Maybe people couldn't see our fancy podcast microphones.

I think we ve got a customer. We're curious if this is a tree sale or it's a news program. IT is both, I know, kind of crazy.

AManda and leo cyran and some extended family were headed to the park when they saw our sign, who was just a matter of really ament.

Are you interested in a tree?

Yes, are interested in a tree.

excEllent. We were just discussing how much to charge for them because we haven't .

never heard you say that you think they might be worth one hundred and fifty .

dollars before we put a Price on this tree. Would you like to hear the story of the tree? Of course. ExcEllent picture, if you will, a farm in the middle of pennsylvania, rolling hills, their cows. There is a beautiful little barn off the distance. And you're thinking, oh, is this where they grow the Christmas tree? Es, but no, this is where they auction Christmas .

trees already free to. Cross fade with walking sounds book steps in a field .

one week ago. All right.

good morning. ms. Lin berg.

嗯。

beautiful, beautiful day.

Sunrise, thirty eight degrees.

Got to a be warm today, not for Christmas. Cy, hello. IT, welcome up to play money on Robert .

Smith and i'm next fountain and we are in mythical berg, pennsylvania.

You know, every time i've had a Christmas tree, I somehow pictured IT cut down from a snowy forest by A A burly lumberjack on and IT magically appearing on my street corner. But really, there are a bunch of weird, fascinating steps in between that determine exactly how many Christmas stories get sold and how expensive they are today.

On the show, we visit the world's largest auction of Christmas trees, where the you tide dreams of boys and girls meet the hard reality of supply and demand.

We have a thousand dollars in cash.

We have a pick up truck. Anything can happen.

For every .

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Let's just take a moment.

That is a lot of trees.

amazing.

The buffo valley auction center is a big warehouse. Plop down in the middle of prime pennsylvania farmland.

The Christmas trees are stack like firewood in this big quarter mile circle around the .

builders that I can see IT looks.

I can ever Green wall surrounding the property like it's a meeting of castle. Each of the trees is wrapped in twine and piled in mounds the size of a truck. And in front of each mount is a single tree that's unrailed, so you can smell the needles or count the rings or kick the stop, whatever people do here. Good morning. Hi, looking for the office for the parties.

There are forty five thousand Christmas tree es here, so many that the auction doesn't take place inside the building.

The topiary over here.

No, the auctioned ire is gona move from three pile to try pile on the back .

of a pickup truck. And we hear that auction here before .

we spot neil courtney is getting ready to hang himself into the back of the auction. Pick up truck. There's a tiny store for him in the back. The action starts in ten minutes. So where artist king.

fast .

trucks.

what's the deal with? The little store.

the little stools, where I shit.

that is a tiny little stool. And you are not a tiny little man.

No, we are right.

You have a sense of baLance on the back. Have you ever fAllen off?

No, the chairs fast.

Neal says this big Christmas story auction started as a way to make his professional life just a little bit easier. Thirty years ago, he was a traveling auctioneer. Farmers would bring out to their farm to auction off well, know anything they had to sell and eventually meal. And a bunch of farmers thought, why not build an auction center .

and cut all the driving?

And everyone comes to me.

and they did that. People said no one would cut trades and bring him. They cut trades and brought m.

Thirty years ago, neil sold three thousand dollars were the Christmas trees here. Today, he's hoping he's going to action off one point three million dollars worth of needles and branches.

But to hit that huge number, everything will have to go perfectly. And neil has this theory that this year will be the hottest est auction in the last thirty years. You can just feel IT with everyone stuck at home during a pandemic. He thinks people are desperate for something cheerful.

And Christmas is gonna huge. Christmas is is going to be huge.

You think people will get more trees, more bows, more holy?

They are, they're, they are going to make Christmas, Christmas. yeah.

If this is D A banner year for Christmas trees, the market will sense IT here first. This is definitely the largest tree fer all in the nation. Tree fer all hundreds of buyers and cellars come together in one spot, the farmers trucking conniff ers from across pennsylvania and as far away as canada and north CarOlina.

A little trees for apartments that were planted only a few years ago. Big eighteen photos for apartment building lobbies. Those take over a decade to grow. And it's not just your classic fraser. First.

we, we get free ers, we get double. We get turkish fur, we get canadians, we get con colors. We got blue's fruits, serbians, a nord, lots of different varieties.

I have never heard of most of those varieties.

Well, you're gna hear the doubles and the free her, the two year here, the rest of exotics.

and that we suddenly here, loud speaker calling for the start of the.

I guess that that means I. Gotta get toward new up.

into the Better of the pickup and onto the little school. And the truck drives off along a dirt path towards tree pile number with the driving.

I don't know where all the buyers were hiding, but as the truck moves into position, the crowd starts to assemble maybe one hundred guys, and they are mostly guys in hoodies and car hearts.

They work at garden center's hardware stores. Some are just planning to set up in a bacon corner lot, and they're all here looking for a good day.

I position myself next to a man who looks like he spends a lot of time outside.

My name is.

and where do you work?

What do you do? Alexandre reginia, and the farm market business .

that's right outside of washington, D. C. Kerrie has this brick red baseball cap.

It's the only one of the crowd. Maybe it's just fashion. Maybe it's some sort of auction trick to get the best deal. That's unclear. But what is clear is that everyone will meet some sort of edge today.

This be a day like nobody is, never seen .

how many you need.

Don't need anyone of the right stuff there, the right money. And you could be a thousand.

could be two thousand. And alright.

ladies and gentleman, here we go going to give you the terms and additions for today's action. Ladies and gentleman, your eyes, your guys, you're check, book talks, say so IT your okay.

you are different, you more rules and then .

ladies and gentleman, ts, get to show off the ground your own hard. You five twelve foot can t five twelve foot can color what you to what you have two hundred ago do did he just say two .

hundred dollars a tree that just .

the first number out of his mouth, it's meant to prime the pump to anchor expectation .

what he's going to quickly drop the five, five, one hundred and fifty, one hundred number.

So for ninety five dollars a tat and you can feel a chill, go through the crowd. It's about fifteen dollars more than neil was.

right? This is gone to be .

a hard year for Christmas.

rips. A lot of the buyers aren't even bedding there in pharma has a garden center in new jorge.

The process are a little high right now. We're going to wait.

Well, I hear if you wait, you might have to pay even more.

Then we'll be going home with nothing.

After each sale, the auctioned truck starts up, moves about seven feet down the road, stops in front of the next pile, and the action .

starts all over.

Meal can option off a pilot. Fifty trees in thirty .

seconds flat .

Carry with the red hat has been red in middle.

The bit to check in what's looking like this year.

Be a good year to be a tree farmer and have trees here to sell that brain big money form.

So been for a bad year to be in a real business.

Well, you just got just your figures a little bit. You know it's not enough to go around around for everybody. So you got to get in.

Kerry is already lowering the standards. The very best trees here are graded. Number one, kerry was desperate and buying. Number two, grade trees is a trees that, you know, misshapen or have a big.

bold spot on the back. I miss fits about a miss IT yeah misfit to give them a home too. Everybody's watch charly brain on the Christmas.

Watch A D, C. You get miss fits this year.

good. Miss fits. Check back with me a little bit.

You know, there's something Carrie said that stuck with me. They're not enough trees to go around, which which seems incredible with forty five thousand trees here. But there's clearly something unusual going on this year beyond just the increased demand during a pandemic.

If there's a supply problem, we need to go to the source to the growers. And IT wasn't hard to find them. They were the folks hanging out of the back of the pack with huge smiles on their faces as Prices went up and up.

These Prices are are amazing, even for the misfit trees via metro. Is my wife party metal? And where's your farm? Where do you grow? Gains delton point of the area. The mitchill have about two hundred and fifty acres of trees, which sounds like a lot, but bion says, in fact, this year, all across the nation, we are experiencing a critical shortage of Christine trees.

not because of covered, but because of the way Christmas trees are grown. Rember how we said that IT takes about a decade to grow a decent size Christmas tree. The ceilings of this year shortage were planted ten years ago.

They were planted during the great recession. Now I didn't know about this because at the time I was covering, you know, thanks going under, but during those years, the tree farming business also collapsed. Remember how no one was buying real estate and there were all those new homes that were either vacant or for close upon, while no one was buying ever Green trees for landscape ing. And the farmers who grow those trees the'd lost this huge revenue stream. And so in desperation, they started to cut the landscaping trees to sell as Christmas trees.

That Christmas during the recession, trees flooded the market. Byron remembers the Prices plunged. Trees that might usually sell for twenty four dollars.

Here the auction seven dollars piece, we were losing money. IT was just cash flow to keep, keep the business running. The Price for trees was so low that during the worst year, two thousand and thirteen farmers started to give up entirely.

They didn't even bother cutting the trees down in shipping in the market. We had fields of trees, literally thousands and thousands. We probably lost somewhere around me of seventy five, one hundred thousand trees that we just let grow because we could not afford to maintain .

them any longer. People stopped planting new trees. A lot of tree farms went out of business by on estimates, half of his fellow tree farmers gave up. The Mitchells only survived because a gas company came in to some other land for fracking.

And that's why there are so few farmers here, so few trees up for auction this year all these years later. These trees that we see today are the maculate survivors of the worst financial crisis. Sense the rate depression .

into the survivors. Go the races.

IT gives us hope for the future. The Prices that we're seeing today that we're gonna able to continue in the spring time, we will be able to plant seed ling. So that way in ten years will have more trees to keep going. A nationwide shortage of trees. You know, when I heard that, I got that feeling, that feeling you get when you're shopping online and you see little pop up that says only three items left at this Price, and you start clicking because because you lose all your rational thought, because you just have to buy IT.

Now you think .

what i'm thinking, we should buy a metric button ad of trees.

I mean, if we can get IT at a good enough Price, we could totally turn a profit in new york. Everything's pense in new york. We can not buy them really.

It's weirdly easy to turn from being reporters to auction participants. We walk over to the auction, your sun ban. We fill in a form he doesn't ask if we know what we're doing or if we have enough money.

or even if we have a truck, although we did come ready, just in case I got a thousand dollars cash in my pocket and a small .

pickup truck.

IT is the world's smallest pickup truck. no. IT has a sixth foot bed and a lubra.

Ben hands us an official piece of paper with our number ten ninety nine written ted in big sharpie. That is our bitter .

number ten ninety nine. Like the tax form we plunge into the crowd gathered behind the ox tros .

to feel little desperate. We get a show to fill.

By this point, we kind of understand how the auction works. You do not bid on the first prize you here, that's just the teaser.

You do have to be able to do math quickly in your head. The number you hear from the auctioneer is the Price per tree. But if you beat in, win, you get the whole pile of trees. You also sudden, ow, fifty seven fraser firms.

I spot a pile.

I like a forty cute .

little trees that would fit in my truck and inside tiny new york apartment. And while we're trying to figure out what .

they're worth, neil starts option in the money.

wait into the .

Price drops for on .

and keep going .

down twenty two and have put .

up the other number.

I got twenty six.

I got twenty. Yeah, twenty six, twenty six or seven.

Somebody body gets you. I can't do IT I I can't do more.

No, no way. Twenty seven, you bid. Twenty six.

we missed IT by a dollar.

We go over to talk to the pro who beat us. Steve crop .

of Virginia, you buy, you just believe by dollar. You're, I thought I could get a steel, but then you just swooped in there.

No, I started. I arted with. We got to work together.

I seriously.

let's cool here. We get to work together.

Now we should be jumping right back in, but Robert is just kind of wandering off muttering, I don't know about flaws and auction theory.

so I know it's capitalism and I know that's the way the market works, right? This is Price discovery, but we don't .

know anything. It's sure we are complete IoT. We are .

complete idiots. So are those really worth twenty seven dollars? Mean that guys willing to pay IT? But he had to have something we bid IT up if we hadn't been here with him. I've gone for twenty twenty one. What is the Price of the tree?

The Price is what he paid for a man.

You know, I didn't remember there is a name for this in economics. It's called the winner's curse. By definition, in order to win an auction, you have to bid more than everyone else thinks the object is worth. Throw out a couple of city boys like us and this whole official markets thing goes out the window.

Also, it's starting to seem like the other efficiencies here we spot the red hat of Carry knows the guy who sells just outside of washington, D C, and ask him how he's doing.

fantastic. Ask where I just kick been. Good, you are smiling.

I do not expect that early this morning you were grim fate.

That's what makes fascinating is IT turns just been right out from explain .

me what happened?

Would you get what you so happy i've been sleeping or something? I don't know. Somebody came over, there were the box donuts, and after the virus, whatever that, to get him a freetown. And I just just scooped him up.

What did you get?

How many just couple piles.

piles of trees, not a piles of donuts. Carry, though, has inspired me to think creatively, to just like grab the moment. And i'm thinking, let's go for misfit trees.

The number two trees.

This is where we brand the zoom tree. I think like. I don't think anyone's tried this yet. Hear me out here. For a lot of people, there are social life now and their worklife is on soon, right? sure. And so you want to have a nice background that says, like, oh, you know, i'm enjoying the holidays and IT doesn't matter if it's a good treat, just has to look good on zoo. M, but just like nobody's wearing pants anymore, we get a kinky, we get a flood number two tree, and then we just market some trees.

We have twenty box to I loving IT. Let's do IT. Then we spotted m the small pile of number two trees around nineteen sixty seven feet.

These are half ty trees .

in nineteen trees in new york.

So we're making our stand here.

Can you guys who knows something about trees tell us how much these are going to go for?

Nobody knows. And then it's too late. Neal, in this .

auction truck pulls up.

I make I contact with.

but don't .

bit yet.

Over fifty dollars.

哎呀哎呀 那 nick finally kids， but he's .

quickly out match OK doing .

fifty two nick bits, fifty five dollars a tree. And then I cannot believe i'm seeing this. He bids against himself and .

you only get three .

pants a day.

You just please go. You.

yes.

R strikes, what's another guys?

Ten, nine, ten, nine.

nine hundred ninety, a group in the country?

哦， no. Immediately, people start giving us a hard time about the Price we paid. But you know what? We don't care. We got trees. We start throwing them in the bed of my pickup.

All we have to do now is bring the back to bricklin and sell these nineteen trees for a profit when our show continues. Actually, wait, what can I get? A nick?

The truck is full.

Who will? You've only put in half the trees. Yes, we have seven trees we can fit into next. Tiny nick, ever the hustler, approaches a bunch of of guys next to and goes into. Salesman.

I bought them for fifty five. I mean, which fifty five?

Um how about a fifty box?

It's worth IT to me.

We just money last .

times five thirty five dollars.

Okay, now we're read.

You just got to tie them down and .

head for the big city after the birth.

Hey, eric bars, before we get back to the show, a bit of year and reflection and twenty and twenty three planet money followed the wild art of inflation of interest rates. We brought you a series about A I and an episode produced by A I, and we served up another extremely infotainment season of planet money summer school.

Of course, we have big plans for a lots more cool stuff like that, twenty twenty four, but that stuff will not be possible without your help. This is where we want to say a big thank you to our planet money plus supporters and anyone listening who already donates to public media and to anyone out there who isn't a supporter yet. Right now is the time to get behind the npr network, especially with big election you are coming up. So please join N P R plus at plus that N P R that org, or make a tax deductable donation now a donate that N P R dot org slash money. And thanks.

Well, now that you've heard the store.

And so that brings us back to the day after thanksgiving, a street corner in parks' brickland, the cyan family, listening to our every word captivated by the story. Avoid the great recession means they should pay a hundred fifty dollars for a tree that we bought for fifty five.

But the nice thing is, when people, if someone who want to see your tree, maybe in the background of a zoom call, or perhaps a visit, you could just say to them, hey, do you have twenty minutes because you could listen to an entire episode about this exact treat. I mean, that's just.

well, that doesn't make IT more valuable. Yeah, definitely IT couldn't make IT more valuable because obviously the story is has currency. I mean, that's what you're selling us is a story and a Christmas tree. And let's Christa.

because we pull the top tree of the pile on rabbit and honestly, IT is not that bad.

It's time to hagger. And immediately we realized that because we told the sidin family the story of the tree, we have lost a lot of our negotiating power. We don't need to hear the show to know that these are secondary trees.

What you but Frankly, there's no other trees out right now. Yeah, there's a lot of demand birkin for trees this year. What did they say? They paid.

They told us. They told us we roll back the table. They're well. I mean.

there's all sorts of extra cost. The the gas i've got a rental car to hotel rooms.

I about loppers and I saw I paid to park the truck in a garage because we didn't want the tree stolen.

Broker in meals, taxes, new jersey toes but .

leo sirion is not buying IT. He loves a lobo offer the standard ten dollars per foot. That's the going .

right around here. Say, box. No.

what?

What do you think? I mean, I think, I guess what, I would take a hundred dollars.

I will take a hundred dollars .

for this year. So of way, he shaking his head, he's shaking his head. He's trying to be negotiated. It's our for .

sale and our only sale for a really long time.

Yeah, we stood there for hours and we tried every trick. We told the story of the maculate recession tree at least a dozen times. No one was impressed.

Four hours later, as the sun was starting to set, we had only sold the one tree. And so we got desperate.

We drove up brookland to the cow Christmas, which actually got a few six trees.

We also sold one to Roberts wife, to his neighbor. I saw two to my neighbors.

And then we just started to show Better npr colleagues apartments, forcing them to buy a tree for the sake of the podcast dac metics .

bith Roberts with how's the going? How's the Christmas tree business?

How well could IT be going if we're selling a torc workers at this point? J coste, we ve got to a tree.

Thirty five, come on.

Sixty box.

That's a Daisy .

paid SHE didn't question he wanted to pay more. Well.

IT, maybe it's worth more to her.

Nick, I knew you made a spreadsheet of our profits .

and loss here. IT is with taxes. We paid one thousand, one hundred seven dollars and seventy cents for the trees, and we sold all one thousand of them for grand total of one thousand, one hundred and five dollars.

That is a loss of two dollars and .

seventy cents before expenses.

Yes, there is that. So for the sake of accounting, i'm going to book all of the expenses into the cost of the podcast part of the venture will call goodwill. And so basically.

we're even that is some creative accounting, not A I driving home that night, we were a little depressed.

but later in the evening, one of our customers sent us a photo. Art tree was set up in their living room with Sparkling lights and a little santa on top. And you know, IT did not look like a miss fit. IT didn't look like a number two tree. IT looked like the Christmas tree of my childhood memories.

And that family who paid a hundred dollars for their tree, leo, AManda souls, alta, they went home and believe IT or not, recorded this song about the experience. Leo sirian, the dad, he's a composer.

stroling through the neighborhood. Wondering if my baby, we find a tree for the family. We try and try and try and try, try. Hundred thousand for the that everybody find me from. The boys and planet money.

That was Robert Smith and nick fountain from Christmas of twenty twenty. And and since then, we have in fact kept in touch with our friends neil courtney at the buffalo valley produce auction to periodical check on the state of the Christmas tree market. And you know, this year, when we called up neel, we had to, of course, talk about the one big economic force that has changed since we first met him back in twenty twenty. inflation.

Who knows what the rate places? Inflation hit the world of everything. We live in a wild economy.

Labor costs, fertilizer saw all those inputs to the Christmas tree growing process are more expensive than they used to be. But neel told us, for the most part, that stuff hasn't really been passed on to consumers. Accept that the the very high end of the tree market, your your super fancy luxury trees.

Once again, the real story here is about the supply of Christmas trees. The last few years, tree growers have been essentially borrowing from Christmas's future, cutting down trees they might otherwise have let grow. This year, after years of new planting, supply is finally starting to catch up with demand again. And new managed to have a record year in twenty .

twenty three IT was great. This this sale was our biggest sale ever. Just buy a little bit um let's work more money. We actually sold five thousand less trains and and gross, they craze amount more money.

And and while that might make you think that that means that Christmas trees you and I buy have gone up in Price, that doesn't seem to be the case. Neil told us that all of these gains came from soaring Prices on a different category of Christmas tree are really, really big ones, ten footers or bigger that you might see in the lobby of a big office building. Those take longer to grow.

So the supply of tall, tall trees hasn't come all the way back yet. And well, in the past seven, eight years, Christmas trees have gotten more expensive. Neil says he thinks the market trend has finally begun to flat nought.

I believe the cut Christmas tree ry markets going to stay home to even kill. Now for a overall, some of the retailers this year are saying their sales are off orbit, but that we're hoping that, that we come back even stronger next year.

Niel's impression is that the average Price of a Christmas tree will hover around the same Prices last year, somewhere .

around eighty box. Can we buy IT from the boys?

We always want to hear your stories. You can email us at planet money at N P R D O R G, or you can find on social media at planet money. Today's show was originally produced by James seed with help from gilly moon.

IT was edited by briant first, alex gold. Mark is planet moneys executive producer. Special thanks to matt harsh for inspiring this episode and to nick fountains father for use of his regular sized truck.

Or small try and I see pictures and small, i'm caning my love. This is N. P. R. Thanks for listening.

And a special thanks to our funder, the offered peace alone foundation for helping to support this podcast.