Skip to content

Silent Eloquence

Silence. Eloquence. Everything in between.

Menu
  • About
  • Check-in
  • Contact
Menu

Wall Street of flower trade

Posted on May 29, 2007 by Surya

Have you ever wondered why a flower costs that costs 50 cents today costs 5 EUR on Valentine’s day? Why roses cost more than tulips (below), or why tulips cost more than gerberas? Simple matter of supply and demand, you would say. But who sets these prices? How? When? Where?



Last week, we drove to the Aalsmeer flower auction house (below)- Bloemenveiling Aalsmeer – the largest commercial building in the world, covering a size of 1 million sq.m or 200 football fields. Every day, millions of flowers and cut plans are brought to Aalsmeer, where it is auctioned off to potential buyers all over the world, thus setting the price of flowers and effectively making it the wall street of flower trade.




A visit to the flower auction would be a joy to flower lovers as well as to any business aficionado. The auction house (below) traces its origins to as early as 1911, when the growers came together in response to the growing power of intermediaries, and the first ‘export flowers’ were auctioned at café Welkom in Aalsmeer. Today, the Bloemenveiling Aalsmeer boasts a an average daily turnover of 6.6 million Euros, with about 60,000 clock transactions every morning.



The five auction rooms (below), which together house 13 auction clocks form the heart of the Bloemenveiling. The price is determined by the Dutch auction system – the first buyer to press the button not only determines the price, but buys the batch at the same time. Every day, the same products are brought into the clock room to be auctioned in front of the clock.



Based on the information they see on the clock face (below), they have to make a quick decision on how much they would want to buy and at what price – not an easy task, especially since it is all done by 7:00am, before most of us would have had our morning coffee.



This gives enough time for the flowers to reach buyers all over the world, while they are still fresh. Aalsmeer boasts a state-of-the-art logistics – the Aalsmeer shuttle (below) is a unique and efficient electrically operated suspended rail system that transports the equivalent of 120 full freight trucks every hour.



The various buyers then deliver the flowers to their end customers – be it a supermarket in Germany or a boutique shop in London or a garden in Moscow or a chic shop in Tokyo or the famous flower markets of Amsterdam (below), before it makes its way into our flower vases, to brighten up our home.

Who would have imagined the complex journey each flower has made before it reaches our homes?




Source: Bloemenveiling Aalsmeer

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook

Related posts:

  1. Broek op Langedijk – the first sail-through auction house
  2. Review: Desert Flower

3 thoughts on “Wall Street of flower trade”

  1. Mridula says:
    July 14, 2007 at 7:12 am

    I think I would I would love visiting such a place!

  2. Pingback: Silent Eloquence | Broek op Langedijk – the first sail-through auction house
  3. Pingback: Flower market | DesiPundit

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Please answer: (required) Time limit is exhausted. Please reload CAPTCHA.

Recent Comments

  • 10 years | Silent Eloquence on Remembering a journey
  • J. on Excerpt: The Picture of Dorian Gray
  • Surya on Mother
  • Siddhartha on Mother
  • Loxley on Review: The Reluctant Fundamentalist
  • Ajish on Me too..!
  • Punjabi on Languages or Dialects?
  • Alpha on Why do we appreciate art?
  • sameer on Me too..!
  • lol 7 years later on Languages or Dialects?

Archive

Categories

  • Asides
  • Blog related
  • Books
  • Catch-all
  • Culture & Languages
  • Entertainment
  • Favourites
  • Featured
  • Fiction
  • India
  • Links
  • Management
  • Musings
  • Personal
  • poetry
  • random
  • Science
  • Short Story Month
  • Society
  • Tech
  • Travel
  • Women
  • Writing

Twitter

  • 32 pages. 10975 words. 2.5 chapters. Progress. #writing #WritingCommunity about 6 days ago
  • Wordle 326 2/6 🟩🟨🟨⬛⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 about 1 week ago
  • I never know what to do on the days when I get the word in under 2 mins. The day stretches ahead… Wordle 322 3/6… https://t.co/rjIVh5MrzX about 2 weeks ago
  • RT @ceciliaclyra: Sometimes it makes sense to put away a story that lives inside you ---- but please don't put away the storyteller. about 2 weeks ago
  • I sent out my first newsletter today. #happy about 3 weeks ago
  • #story by Yefim Zozulya about citizen’s right to life, decided arbitrarily by an elected authority. The story may… https://t.co/75CRJKg63t about 1 month ago
  • “Triumph—rare, lucky, dull, and brief—is an artifact of editing: failure, failure, failure, failure, a moment of ju… https://t.co/F5st6e1pwx about 1 month ago in reply to silenteloquence
  • “Flaubert observed, “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when w… https://t.co/59aKu02lNF about 1 month ago
  • A problem that deserves urgent attention - how to ensure #ArtificialIntelligence objectives will align with a plur… https://t.co/7ivfCJ61yl about 2 months ago
  • Few beliefs shape our reality than our sense of self. Whether you believe you are powerful or powerless, you are ab… https://t.co/U1me5PNDEI about 2 months ago
@silenteloquence
©2022 Silent Eloquence | Built using WordPress and Responsive Blogily theme by Superb