[sdinenno]

In my market you have to bid sharp, and that extra 6% on the warranty labor may make you non competitive if that happens to be the case.

You're not looking at both sides of the issue. I could just as easily say, "In my market you have to back up what you sell and if you don't offer a replacement warranty, that may make you non-competitive." The additional percentage only makes you non-competitive if you are dealing with customers who don't care about a plant warranty. I have found that most of them do care. Usually, I'm asked about it by potential customers if I don't mention it in a quote.

We have very little retail nursery presence and activity in the greater Portland areas. Big boxes dominate.

But you don't have big boxes like Home Depot Landscape Supply which are HD stores devoted exclusively to landscaping. And you don't have a large and successful chain of retail garden stores that also offers a one-year plant warranty. And maybe you don't have landscape architects who routinely include a one-year replacement of all plants in the specs on their plan documents. We have all of these things and we can't just say, "Sorry, but we don't give a plant warranty."

We buy mostly from a nursery that gives us a warranty. Or we buy from the HDLS stores which have a "Pro Desk" where they offer prices to landscaping contractors that are competitive with the best prices from the nurseries (and contractors get the same one-year plant warranty).

I still do not understand how you can guarantee a product that is perishable and subject to an unknown number of variable problems and blindly say you WILL replace it even if the maintenance guy aced it out, if it does not get water for a month ??

What if the landscape does not get water for a month in July and the whole damn thing dies ??.

You just have to play the percentages. You mark up your prices enough to cover a certain amount of expected losses.

And you have to have stipulations in the warranty to guard against natural calamaties (such as drought) and buyer's negligence. You can't make it unconditional unless you mark up each job by a fairly large percentage.