Yule Tree Magnate Means Business : Competition: Critics say Stu Miller, who has built an evergreen empire, is a Goliath trying to squash rivals. Miller says he just demands fair play.

Christmas tree magnate Stu Miller--who turned a $4,000 savings into one of the largest Christmas tree retailing businesses in the state--didn’t build his evergreen empire by being a nice guy.

“Christmas trees are nothing more than a commodity,” said Miller, whose company now operates about 50 lots around the state, including eight in the San Fernando Valley and 13 elsewhere in Los Angeles. “Nobody has ever applied good business practices to the Christmas tree business before.”

To help his enterprise take root and grow over the last decade, Miller has sued competitors and violated a promise with a Christian organization not to sell on their property on Sundays, court records show. People who live near his main lot say he has bullied them when they complain about traffic and late-night work on the property.

Most recently, Miller filed a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Community College District to try to stop farmer Joe Cicero from selling trees from his fruit and vegetable stand at Pierce College, which is across the street from a Miller and Sons lot.

But Miller, 48, an affable man who opened his first lot in Granada Hills as a teen-ager in 1961, resents the characterization that he is a Goliath cruelly strong-arming tiny competitors.

All he wants, he said, is fair play. And he is willing to go to court to ensure that.

“They have to abide by the same fair-business practices that we have to,” he said, shaking his fist for emphasis.

Miller denies that he deliberately violated his contract with Valley Cathedral, a Christian counseling organization whose parking lot he rented to sell trees during the 1985 season.

In the contract, Miller agreed not to conduct business on the ministry property on Sundays. But for two consecutive Sundays, the lot was open for tree sales.

Dr. James Coppedge, Valley Cathedral minister, said in a court affidavit that Miller’s son admitted he knew the lease prohibited any Sunday sales but said his father ordered him to sell anyway.

Valley Cathedral won a temporary restraining order prohibiting further Sunday transactions, but by the time it was granted, only one Sunday remained until the holiday.

After Christmas, Coppedge asked Miller why he had broken his promise.

“He thought the Lord wanted him to succeed in business, and I got the impression that he thought that whatever he had to do to do that, that’s what his duty was,” Coppedge said. “Break a contract if you need to, but sell those trees--that’s what his philosophy was.”

Miller maintains, however, that he misunderstood the contract and thought the prohibition applied only to Sunday mornings. He said he never would have rented a lot that forbade all business all day Sundays because 65% of Christmas tree sales occur on weekends, he said.

“He’s a very smart businessman and he understands the court system and litigation,” William Norland, vice president of academic affairs at Pierce College, said of Miller.

Pierce administrators first dealt with Miller in 1985, when he sold Christmas trees wholesale to the Pierce College Associated Students Organization.

The problem was, Norland said, Miller sold the trees to the students at close to the retail price--and the stands were sold at the exact retail price--so the campus made only $1,500 to $1,800 in profit.

Miller refused to disclose any information about his finances. However, when Cicero sold trees at the site last year, he earned $22,000 in profits.

“We’d never done anything like this before, and we didn’t know if it was a good price or a bad price,” Norland said. “It’s hard for me to say he took advantage of us. Had we been highly efficient and understood the Christmas tree operation better, we probably could have done better.”

This year, Norland said, Miller filed a lawsuit against the community college district to force school administrators to order Joe Cicero--who farms 15 acres of Pierce land--to stop selling Christmas trees.

Cicero and the college have developed a mutually beneficial relationship over the years, with Cicero providing technical support and equipment for the school’s agriculture program, Norland said, and tree sales helped him keep his little farming operation viable.

But Miller’s lawsuit charged that the district should have taken public bids for the right to sell trees on the property.

To avoid a protracted legal battle with Miller, the district prohibited Cicero from selling trees on the site this year, Norland said. Now, however, the college is engaged in a legal battle with Cicero, who began tree sales this weekend.

Without Miller’s lawsuit, the college would probably have allowed Cicero to sell the trees, Norland said.

Miller defended his action against the college district, saying that if the college wasn’t willing to open the process to a public bid, then it wasn’t fair for anyone to sell trees there.

Miller made a similar argument to California State University Northridge officials in 1985, which Oregon farmer Jack Price said resulted in his eviction from the Devonshire Downs fairgrounds on campus, where he and his family had been selling trees for six years.

Price, who now peddles his trees on the Woodland Hills Little League field, said that after Miller kicked up a fuss, the university kicked him off the land but out of courtesy did not allow any other tree sales there.

If Miller had won the right to use the site, Price said, “he would have gotten all our customers.”

Miller said he believes his portrayal by competitors as a mean-spirited Christmas Scrooge stems from resentment over his success.

“It’s getting hard to be successful in this country anymore,” he said. “America is turning away from people becoming successful. There is a widening gap between rich and poor these days, and when you are successful, you are looked upon differently.”

According to court records, Miller filed a slander suit against Price after Price allegedly suggested in a 1981 meeting of Christmas tree growers that Miller had bribed a district official in order to obtain a lease on some government land in the Valley.

The suit claimed that Price had slandered him because he was “greatly angered by the competition” and “harbored ill-will” toward Miller. The suit, which was dismissed by a Van Nuys Superior Court judge in 1988, sought $750,000 in damages.

Miller said he does not remember the suit.

“I have gotten this far by hard work. We were very small, too, once, and we were subjected to the same bidding process,” he said.

Miller’s venture into the Christmas tree business began when he helped out a few friends at their father’s lot during the 1960 Christmas season. At the end of the season, he received $400.

The next year he invested his $4,000 savings in his first lot at Devonshire Street and Zelzah Avenue in Granada Hills.

Until 1980, Miller never operated more than five lots in a season, and the company was just a “mom and pop operation that gave us extra money.” He bought his trees wholesale in downtown Los Angeles, and most of his income came from his work as a carpenter and from his television rental business.

But, in the 1982 season, Miller opened his first three “volume lots”--lots with low prices that did not provide extensive customer services. It proved to be a successful formula. This year the company expects to sell half a million trees on 50 lots around the state.

Miller also owns nearly 3,000 acres of Oregon Christmas tree farmland. One day, he said, he hopes to have 200 “Stu Miller Price-Is-Right” lots in California.

In addition to his tree lots, which he expects will move half a million trees this season, Miller owns a development company, which is building seven luxury houses in Malibu. He also started a production company and owns a chain of television rental stores.

Miller admits that in the process of making his tree business thrive, he has sometimes done things that others have not liked.

For example, last year, Miller and Sons employees stood near Joe Cicero’s tree stand at Pierce College and passed out flyers advertising their own lot across the street. Miller said he felt that potential customers mistakenly thought they were supporting the college by buying a tree there.

Residents who live next to Miller’s lot at Parthenia Street and Balboa Boulevard complain that employees work there flocking trees very late into the night and in the wee hours of the morning. And traffic generated by the lot has sometimes made it virtually impossible for them to reach their own houses, they said.

When homeowners have tried to discuss the problems with Miller, however, he brushed off their concerns, said one neighbor who asked not to be identified.

Miller, however, said the homeowners were just unhappy because they oppose any tree lot and the commotion it generates near their houses.

“There is an old saying in business: We don’t know the total answer for success, but we do know the answer for failure--trying to please everyone,” he said. “You can’t please everyone.”