WHAT IS A FLORIST?
We are, of course. Annabel Green is a full-service, bricks-and-mortar florist that sells flower arrangements that are made-to-order. We work directly with customers to make sure they get exactly what they want. We sell clothing and jewelry too but our flower products are custom designed and made in house.
WHAT IS AN ORDER TAKER?
A little history: In the early 20th century, a business called FTD (Florists’ Transworld Delivery) was founded. At a time when a non-local delivery required 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 was 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.
It also created a parasitic sub-industry of opportunists pretending to be full service retailers but who are in fact just jobbers with a telephone and a large advertising budget. They’re called order takers. They have no store, no inventory, and in the case of flowers, no expertise.
They’re brokers who take orders over the phone and farm out the work to local florists or even part-timers working out of their homes for extra money. You’ll never know who did the work until it’s dropped on your front porch. Worse, they promote themselves in local advertising and on web sites pretending to be full-service florists.
After selling you flowers to send to your sister for her new baby, their next call could be shilling window replacements or lawn care to another hapless customer who saw another ad. In some cases, they even deceptively name themselves to confuse existing customers of established local retailers. 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? Sure, but we don’t have the legal resources of Apple to sue a scammer possibly operating in Bangalore, India. All we can do is refuse the order, especially for the lowball compensation they offer. But then that jobber could hire an incompetent florist to do the job and we might lose an existing customer because they think we did the work.
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. The recipient is also likely to receive considerably less than you paid for, like grocery store flowers in a cheap plastic pot.
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 takers rarely work in your community. Thanks to voice-over-IP they can be anywhere and in fact many are located in call centers as far away as India and in facilities also engaged in scam calling. Connecticut’s Floral Transaction and Consumer Protection Act prohibits order takers from operating within the state but there’s little it can do when those calls are routed to a fraud factory located in Nigeria.