United States Consumers’ Landscaping Expenditures: A Case of Garden and Lawn Care Services and Equipment

The economic downturns of 2007–09 and the COVID-19 pandemic affected most industries in the United States, including landscape services and equipment sales, and provoked both short-term disruptions and long-term changes. To understand how the landscaping industry has responded, we investigated patterns of consumer expenditures on landscape services and equipment from 2009 through 2021 using a representative sample of 76,895 US households. We categorized US households as detached single-family residents and townhouse residents to more fully articulate the factors that turned potential consumers into purchasers and the factors that affected purchasers’ expenditures. We used a double-hurdle model to identify key factors that drive consumer demand for landscape services and equipment over time, including social-demographics, geographic characteristics, housing conditions, year and seasonal trends, and the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that during the studied period, the demand for landscape services declined in terms of both the percentage of consumers purchasing the services and the purchasers’ average expenditures, while the demand for do-it-yourself (DIY) equipment remained relatively unchanged. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the percentage of consumers who purchased landscape services increased, while the expenditures on landscape services decreased in 2020 and then began to rebound in 2021, but not enough to reverse the overall downward trend. In contrast, purchases of DIY equipment were relatively stable in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and mainly relied on current consumers

Design of Distributed Traceability System for Wheat Products Quality

Part 1: Decision Support Systems, Intelligent Systems and Artificial Intelligence ApplicationsInternational audienceThe circulation of wheat products involves a number of different types of food-related enterprises, including planting bases, grain trading companies, warehousing enterprises, food processing plants, sales companies and so on. The centralized traceability architecture cannot meet the requirements such as transaction data security. While, the distributed traceability architecture faces the difficulty and complexity of information processing for the traceability data stored and managed by different enterprises. In order to meet the requirements imposed on distributed data management and diversity of deployment requirements, an EPC (Electronic Product Code) coding scheme is proposed, in addition, based on which we design and implement a distributed wheat products quality traceability system in this paper. The test indicates that the distributed quality traceability system can track the wheat products quality information in the whole supply chain of wheat products effectively