Visit Your Urban Roots
We are open seven days a week:
Mon – Fri 10am-7pm
Saturday 9am-7pm
Sunday 9am-5pm
Employment Opportunity - General Manager
Position description
Successful Garden Center Co-Op is looking for a progressive, self-motivated General Manager. After two years of operations, Urban Roots has
experienced dramatic growth and seeks an individual with superb organizational, communications and leadership skills.
Responsibilities
Ensure continued improvement of Urban Roots performance by increasing its turnover of product and maximizing profitability.
Achieving performance objectives will require action in the following areas of retail activity: store operations, buying, customer care, marketing, and logistics.
Major parts of the job on a day-to-day basis include identifying, hiring and managing staff, reaching out and effectively scheduling volunteers, finding new ways to improve sales, and meeting customer demand.
Job requirements
- Progressive, self-motivated entrepreneur
- Merchandising experience (store layout and product display)
- Must have strong retail management experience
- Ability to conceptualize and develop strategies to
- Recruit and retain: volunteers and paid seasonal staff
- Effectively schedule paid staff and volunteers
- Formulate pricing policies for merchandise, according to profitability requirements
- Estimate consumer demand and determine the types and amounts of goods to be sold
- Examine merchandise to ensure that it is correctly priced and displayed and that it functions as advertised
- Develop and implement local marketing activities
- The new manager will represent the store’s brand and be a proactive ambassador in the local community
Salary
Base Salary: Negotiable based on experience and past success. This position also includes a lucrative variable compensation plan, which rewards the
GM for achievement of year over year net revenue growth.
Interested? e-mail your resume to: jobs@urbanroots.org
Urban Roots. Where Buffalo Gardens
Urban Roots is a place to buy plants – flowers, shrubs, trees and vegetables – at a location you can drive or walk to in a few minutes. Community owned and operated. Open year round. Urban Roots Community Garden Center offers gardening tools, soil, mulch, plants, unusual varieties, organic products, gifts for gardeners, and workshops in your neighborhood. Urban Roots works with local growers and artisans in order to bring the area regional products and support our local economy as much as possible.
During the summer of 2008, we closed on the two additional lots, adjacent to our existing yard, doubling the size of our outdoor space to 120 × 100 feet. We also installed a well, providing fresh, clean, free water for plant maintenance.
If you’d like to become an Urban Roots member-owner, check out this page: Membership Drive.
Your City. Your Store.
All within a few minutes of downtown Buffalo.
Urban Roots is a community owned, cooperative garden center. As of May 2009, we have 485 Member-Owners. We’re on Buffalo’s West Side, at 428 Rhode Island Street, located two blocks west of Left Bank.
Visit us soon to find out what we have for you.
We are offering a variety of workshops throughout the year. Check them out here.
Become a Member-Owner of Urban Roots
Listen to a piece Joyce Kryszak created last summer on Urban Roots for WBFO 88.7, here.
Join our Membership Drive, we have over 500 Member-Owners
Consider becoming a lifetime member-owner today.
More Than Just Membership
In addition to promoting lifetime membership at Urban Roots, just introducing Urban Roots to your friends, co-workers, and neighbors, will help our business to grow. You might write a personal note of introduction to a gardener or new neighbor you know has not yet discovered the store. You could also include a small gift certificate. For Member-Owners who would like to help us to grow the membership, download our membership tool kit.
Learn more details of membership below.
Download a single membership form to print.
Download 3 membership forms to print, which fit on two sheets.
Urban Roots has a lot to be proud of – being one of the country’s youngest and most unusual cooperatives. We were the first garden center cooperative to organize, offering plant swaps and sales in 2005 and 2006 before we had a business location (or plan). We were the second to incorporate (Urban Earth in Minneapolis took over a closing business and filed legal paper work in October 2006 – three months before Urban Roots). None of these things would have been possible without each of you.
Some of the significant highlights of the past 18 months are:
- Opened our doors for business with 100 member-owners in April, 2007.
- Exceeded 300 member-owners in 2007
- Purchased two more lots,adjacent to our property in March, 2008
- Dug the first well in the City of Buffalo to water our plants in July, 2008
- Employed 8 staff during the summer of 2008
Member-Owner Benefits
- Special Membership Offers – There are monthly discount offers for member-owners, and several special pre-order offers to member-owners annually
- First to Know! Member-owners receive first notification via email of special events, pricing specials, new store arrivals, etc.
- Your Co-operative! All member owners receive voting rights at annual and special meetings. This makes them able to vote on store policy and board of director elections and only member-owners can serve on the board.
We’re thrilled to announce Member Owner #400: Appropriately, she is Kelly Maurer, an employee of the Buffalo Cooperative Federal Credit Union across from the Lexington Coop on Elmwood Avenue.
Urban Roots was listed in the Top Ten of Artvoice’s 100 Things You Must Do This Summer in the 2008 Summer Guide. “9. Dig a little garden. A visit to Urban Roots, the nation’s first cooperative garden center, will get you started. If you haven’t visited the shop at 428 Rhode Island Street (362-8982 / urbanroots.org), then maybe your visit ought to be on June 21, when Urban Roots celebrates its first year in business with activities all day and a reception in the evening.”
Find us around the web.
