Outdoor garden plants are integral products in the nursery and garden stores industry in the United States. Industry reports indicate that home improvement centers and big-box stores pose a significant threat to small garden centers, nursery stores, and ornamental farmers through price competition while small local ornamental businesses tend to focus on personalized products and services to compete with chain retail stores. Identifying the key characteristics of consumer clusters that influence consumer shopping destination preferences can be useful for industry players to devise efficient marketing plans for their niche markets. This study employs cluster analysis techniques and multinomial logistic regression on the cross-sectional data collected from an online survey of 609 consumers to estimate the influence of consumer economic and socio-demographic characteristics on their shopping destination choices. The results from this study indicate that retail consumers of outdoor garden plants can be categorized broadly into four clusters: home improvement center shoppers (47.4%), big-box center shoppers (13.5%), local garden center shoppers (21.2%), and farmers’ market shoppers (17.9%). This study also finds that age, ethnicity, education, household income, number of children in the household, urbanicity, housing arrangements, and political inclination are useful predictors of shopping destination preferences for outdoor garden plants. This study adds valuable information to the market research literature for the retail ornamental horticulture industry.
