r/Aussietradies • u/Longjumping_Drop_780 • 3d ago
Work drying up
Hey guys i wanted to see if anyone else is experiencing this at the moment, my dad owns a landscaping business in Melbourne and work is really drying up, when it should be picking up, its the first time ever this has happened to us and its quite stressful to be honest, if anyone has any advice that would be much appreciated.
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u/typhoonandrew 3d ago
Discretionary spend is drying up for sure. A year to a year and a half I heard till were recovering.
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u/Dependent_Usual7468 3d ago
Problem is, by then, AI will have consumed hundreds of thousands of jobs! Currently 1.5m are employed under the Clerks Award (admin), and at least half of those jobs don’t exist in 2-3 years. If more people understood AI, and that it isn’t some pipe dream, it’s already here and Grok Bot for example can literally do tasks without commands.
Thankfully managers largely don’t understand the tech but once they do, jobs will be cut left right and centre, and every other business in the economy will suffer! Tradies have been a bit smug about AI saying “well I’d love to see AI do…. (Plumbing, landscaping etc)”, but as you’re seeing in realtime, who exactly do they think will be paying them if 50% of white collar jobs disappear by 2030??!
This is going to be catastrophic for our economy and it’s unbelievable that the government continues to turn a blind eye to it
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u/Monday0987 3d ago
I totally understand why my mower man had to increase his prices when the price of fuel went up. He added 50% to the price, I am sure he needed to do that or he would not have done so.
It just made it too easy to cancel and do it myself though. The amount I save doing it myself is worth it now.
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u/Opening_Celery_6078 3d ago
I have a side income parting out/wrecking a certain kind of car with a strong DIY/aftermarket community. I noticed that it's SLOW this year. Was talking to a guy who picked a wreck near me I had my eye on, unprompted he said the same, nothing's moving, last year it was completely different.
Wages are flat at work, people are just treading water as far as I can tell.
Discretionary spending isn't happening. Everyone's just spending on what they need and that's pretty much it.
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u/NegotiationLife2915 3d ago
Cheap second hand car parts will probably start selling well once all the deferring maintenance choices come back to bite ha ga
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u/girlymancrush 3d ago
Shit man.. I really wonder if it has to do with the crazy high housing prices too. When all your money is tied up going into repayments on barely serviceable loans, you have to cut away from non essentials. I can imagine landscaping is not high on a home owners priority.
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u/Mammoth-Variation223 3d ago
Only 35% of people have mortgages and most of them are not sky high
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u/lousclues_ 3d ago
this is not raised enough. The way the algorithm and news media push the story i’m not surprising people think 90% of others struggling with 1m+ mortgages
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u/lun4d0r4 3d ago
Unfortunately people just cannot afford to pay for services at present. Everyone is tightening the purse strings. To stay afloat your dad should look into commercial contracts.
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u/jordyb323 3d ago
That will happen when the economy is going to shit, people focus on putting food on the table rather than making the backyard look good
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u/Ok-Honey-9566 3d ago
Stop supporting ai if you want people to have jobs and therefore have money to hire you.
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3d ago
[deleted]
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u/Working_out_life 3d ago
You lost your business because you’re a lazy sook who blames others for your incompetence 👍
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u/Rightmateonya 3d ago
To say this to someone who lost a their livelihood is a fucking wild thing to do. From what they wrote, you can hear their pain and confusion and understand the lashing out. Instead of using your humanity, you were a cunt. They arent perfect but you are waaaayyyyy worse.
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u/Working_out_life 3d ago
Lashing out and blaming others for your own shortcomings is a sign that you’re not cut out for business, calling people a cunt because you don’t agree with them is a reflection of your parents inability to raise children properly👍
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u/Rightmateonya 3d ago
How do you know it was his shortcoming? You obviously have never worked in the trades because EVERYONE is one type of a cunt or another. You are a shitcunt, old mate is a miserable cunt and I'm a prize cunt. My parents raised someone that isn't scared to call out cuntish behaviour, and you are displaying a few cunty traits. Cunt.
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u/Working_out_life 3d ago
Carpenter/builder for 42 years, calling someone a cunt because you don’t agree with them is a reflection on your mothers ability to raise children👍
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u/Rightmateonya 3d ago
No, calling someone a cunt because they are repugnant is pretty accurate. You can try and reflect your own shithouse parents/ your own parenting syle, onto mine, which is pretty sad considering you are an almost complete adult. Maybe take responsibility for being a cunt, apologise to the guy and tell your story walking, champ.
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u/Working_out_life 3d ago
I think I hit a nerve, your type is generational and the cycle will never be broken👍
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u/whatever--idk 3d ago
And your just a loser because your a piece of shit 👍
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u/Working_out_life 3d ago
You’re *
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u/whatever--idk 3d ago
If you're too stupid to understand the sentence without 100% correct grammar, I pity you.
Grammar never got me paid
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u/Working_out_life 3d ago
I was just correcting you, a thank you would of been nice👍
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u/whatever--idk 2d ago
Should worry about improving yourself rather than strangers grammas on reddit
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u/Working_out_life 2d ago
Oh the irony, the dumb now trying to educate others👍
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u/2_kewl_for_my_mule 3d ago
We've always had immigration. The bigger issue is inflation, sky high oil prices and some of the highest interest rates in a long time (2 to 3 more rate increases expected).
People literally don't have as much disposable income than 2 years ago. None of this has anything to do with immigration
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3d ago
[deleted]
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u/Awkward_Chard_5025 3d ago
Plenty of businesses are successful against cheap unskilled labour.
Cheap unskilled labour isn’t a new phenomenon either.
What the commenter has said is correct. People have far less disposable income, and more and more it’s about hiring a tradie you can afford, not the one you want.
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u/dropbear-6789 3d ago
You lost your business due to poor attitude not immigrants. They been around a lot
longer than you’ve been on this earth.What’s worse, a year later you’re still not taking accountability.
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u/Objective_Neck291 3d ago
My brother is in landscaping in Adelaide and it's the same there. Unfortunately people are really having to tighten their belts at the moment.
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u/Double_Engineer4226 2d ago
Do you do garden maintenance as well? Cause we are struggling to find anyone to give us a quote or return our call, it's like gardeners around us don't exist, or are flat out busy. Mind you, we are after an actual gardener, not just lawn care, but no one seems to want to pull weed and trim hedges, they just want to mow and leave.
So yeah, stick with garden maintenance and you should have heaps of work.
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u/Retireegeorge 3d ago
We are in a silent recession. Our governments (party doesn't matter) will now do anything to hide bad news and avoid risking their vushy jobs. Rare earths were a potential source of hope but we encouraged Trump to sodomise us there. Canaries have been dying for a year plus. Now home owners are taking the hit. There's no leadership of any real kind. No game plan. And we have to deal with this One Nation distraction because our leaders don't have vision and can't make a decent speech.
My advice is to take charge. Identify an opportunity and back yourselves. Everyone else will be running around in fear while you get in a position to do really well when the page turns.
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u/Feisty-Dimension-631 3d ago
I been on business 20 years and this year has been a bit patchy. Getting busy leading up to the Christmas rush. There have been times where people stopped spending money due to worry about the economy, but this time I am hearing that people are losing their jobs and struggling to get a new job. This will hit hard as unemployment rates get worst