WHAT IS A FLORIST?

Because you’re here you know what a florist is. We are, of course. A florist is a small business that buys flowers and related products wholesale to either sell directly to retail customers or use in constructing custom arrangements for special orders. The order can be a small as a single rose or as large as decorating a wedding hall for 300 guests. The point is that Annabel Green is a full-service business that specializes in products that are made-to-order. We also work directly with customers to make sure they get exactly what they want.

WHAT IS AN ORDER-TAKER?

In the early 20th century, a business called FTD (Florists’ Transworld Delivery) was founded. At a time when a non-local delivery required steam trains and horse-drawn wagons, it could take a week just to deliver a package to a neighboring state. But what if you wanted to have fresh flowers delivered to grandma’s house on her birthday and she lived on the opposite coast? That’s where FTD provided a valuable service. It became a middleman in the order. Your order was telegraphed to a florist near grandma who took care of its fulfillment. The florist gave FTD a discount and the full price was paid by the consumer. Everybody wins.

Over the following decades other middlemen models appeared in lots of retail fields: Toll-free order centers, internet marketplaces, and app-based platforms where you could even have it select a preferred insurance company for your car.

But it also created a parasitic sub-industry of opportunists pretending to be full service retailers but who are in fact just a salesman with a telephone and a large advertising budget. There is no store, no inventory, no floral design expertise. They’re brokers who farm the work out to full-service companies, often for competitive bidding. You’ll never know who did the work until it’s dropped on your front porch. Worse, they sell their “services” in local advertising and on web sites pretending to be full-service florists. In some cases, they even deceptively name themselves to confuse existing customers of established local retailers. For instance, they’ll call themselves “Camille Flowers” to steal business from “Camille Johnson Flowers“.

In fact, there’s an order-taker doing exactly that with Annabel Green Flowers. Could we sue for unfair competition or even trademark infringement? Sure, but local florists don’t have the legal resources of Apple or General Motors. All we can do is refuse the order. But then that jobber will hire a possibly incompetent florist to do the job and we might lose a good existing customer because they might think we did that.

You might be thinking, “well, that’s not my problem.”  In fact it is, because order-takers are basically like ticket scalpers. For them to extract their profits means that you will pay more for the same order at a legitimate florist. Or you’re going to receive considerably less than you paid for. When you order flowers from an ad, be sure to check that it’s a bona fide florist. Ask for their address and check that it exists in Google Maps. Order gatherers rarely work in your community but can be located in call centers as far away as India in complexes also involved in scam calling.