Refusing works!!!

[Joe Mioux]

Joe Mioux wrote the following, but it really misses the point.

"The end result of your business practice is some flower buying consumer is being hurt or inconvenienced by you not accepting these orders. Right or wrong, OG's are here."

This premise makes a guess as to why flower consumers may fall out of the habit of buying from our industry. What happened to price point? Everyone seems to agree that price point is the most important factor these days, but some florists would still have us believe that using a middleman is an 'accepted' cost increase in the consumers eyes. BTW, if you are curious...ask the consumer.....might be surprised what they think.

Flower Power

Sorry child:

This dog won't hunt.

Your answer to my comment are two different issues.

Simply put, if the OG has to call the sending customer back, that customer is being inconvenienced.

Now to your response.

I can beat WalMart on the price AND quality of my spring garden plants.

People buy at Walmart for two reasons. Larger selection of gardening items than I offer. Such as such as chemicals, hoses, rakes, etc. ( I also can not compete on price for those items) and convenience.

Likewise, I can beat WalMart on the price of some flowers they may sell locally.
As an example, I just bought 60 cm Charlottes for 15 cents on Monday's auction. If I had to, I could sell them for 45 cents and get my 200 pct mark up (aka 3X mark-up).

You have swerved into other issues with your post. This thread relates to incoming wire orders not local sales. Head to head, I can beat box store pricing on many products.

what I can not control is what the receiving florist wants to charge for his product.

Joe

 

[Joe Mioux]

Goldfish, Joe and whom ever....

Imagine, (and this happens everyday) that a customer shops your store and sees the XXX arrangement in your cooler for local delivery priced at $47.50 plus delivery. This same customer then goes shopping at Walmart and sees the same XXX arrangement priced at $39.96 so they place the order.

Now Walmart transmits the order thru a wire service (since they do not deliver directly) and said wire service removes Walmarts name from the order and sends it to your shop and you fill it. The traditional florist segment of the industry has just lost a customer, the wire service has just gained the consumer data, and Walmart, and the wire service made a profit, and then the local florist has to eek out a slim margin, make and deliver the arr.

All the while, the consumer has learned that you are priced higher than Walmart, that they can order at Walmart and that YOU will be the delivering florist and that YOU will be the one responsible should anything go wrong along the way. Sorry, I am not willing to put businesses reputation on the line for them.
_____________________

You forgot about Walmart's Everyday delivery price of $9.94. (I just checked it on their site). Now your $39.95 order becomes a $49.xx order.

Joe

 

[Joe Mioux]

Any how may people have signed up for the free directory ... ???

41 links, including some duplicates from people that cover different towns. According to this poll, 106 were onboard. It's as shameful as the response to the Real Florist Blog - we are offering free links from highly rated sites, and people can't be bothered.

Oh, well ... those that do will benefit, and will continue to prosper

Ryan

Ryan: Thank you for the effort.
Joe

 

[carol]

Any how may people have signed up for the free directory ... ???

41 links, including some duplicates from people that cover different towns. According to this poll, 106 were onboard. It's as shameful as the response to the Real Florist Blog - we are offering free links from highly rated sites, and people can't be bothered.

Oh, well ... those that do will benefit, and will continue to prosper

Ryan

Ryan, I tried several times to add our shop into this but I just never find the right link?? A year or so ago I thought I had accomplished it but when looking at the listing there is no shops listed for NH..
as for the blog.. I am just learning to blog.. I am not a stupid florist.. I am a working florist who really has tried to sign up for these special services you guys are setting up..but I must have missed the original instructions.

Communication is a real problem.. I get to read this board maybe once a day..maybe once a week.. depending of available time.. so I am not as hip to all these new things.. and our customers, older customers that is are not using them yet.. but the younger crowd sure is. I have college part timers and they have set us up in Myspace.com.. the young people go there all the time.. we need to go there to find them..or let ourselves be found

 

[Tracy D'Amico]

http://realflorists.flowerchat.com/index.php/a?cat=57
Carol, your shop is listed there ... hope that helps.
MySpace, really? Cool, I'm going to check that out. The place gives me the creeps with all I've heard in the (bad)news about it, but if it works for us, then awesome.
tracy

 

[Bigted]

Fulfillment Centers

I'm really surprised that not one person responded to my concerns about W/S fulfillment centers. If enough florists "refuse the orders", they are absolutely the next step. Doesn't that concern anyone?

 

[12BucksFor2Dozon]

I'm really surprised that not one person responded to my concerns about W/S fulfillment centers. If enough florists "refuse the orders", they are absolutely the next step. Doesn't that concern anyone?

Those who are still in bed with the wires and are still advertising full-page YP "we wire TFTD anywhere!" ads could care less about LFCs, and in fact probably like the idea because they know the money is in the selling, not the making. In fact, EVERYONE knows there is hardly any real money in filling anymore, so why not LFC?

FTD and TF are brands that consumers have been exposed to for a long time now, and we still get 5 calls a week not asking about flowers but for FTD or TF. Usually elderly people who simply remember when the only wire-out option was to use these now-overpriced brands. There was once a time where the "T" in FTD (transmission) and the T in TF (tele) where valuable, one of kind assets and had true value and were worth to 30% or so commission that was scraped from the order.

These days are over, transmission cost are basically zero (just look at Skype and bittorrent), but FTD, TF and greedy OG shops are still using the out-dated fee structures to suck to remaining value from these type of order. The consumers wonder why the value is so poor, and I for one am convinced that the next generation of buyers and owners will skip the wires in masses.

So LFCs have a limited fear to me, because they represent the worse in buggy whip 20th century flower delivery systems, and will, in the near future, be routed around like a damaged internet node.

 

[goldfish]

Now Walmart transmits the order thru a wire service (since they do not deliver directly) and said wire service removes Walmarts name from the order and sends it to your shop and you fill it. The traditional florist segment of the industry has just lost a customer, the wire service has just gained the consumer data, and Walmart, and the wire service made a profit, and then the local florist has to eek out a slim margin, make and deliver the arr.

If we replace 'Walmart' with any OG name ('xxxxx.com') above, that's precisely what has been going on. The "local florist" fill for Walmart/OGs because of either of the two reasons. It is important to differentiate these two.

(a) Some florists don't quite realize that they are most likely losing money by filling wire-ins and at the same time giving away the valuable customer info (the person who ordered it) to their competitors.

(b) Other florists do realize this dilemma, but can't get out of it for one reason or the other.

Here, I would like to elaborate on category-(b) florists to which we belong. As to category-(a) florists, I think these florists will not be able to survive; but again, these shops will be sold to new owners, many of whom I predict will be repeating the same mistakes.

Now, why can't category-(b) florists get rid of wire-in filling business. Because we are too "dependent" on it. I can give you the number, so that you can better understand our situation, which is typical of many new florists who inherited failing or struggling florists.

The previous owner of our store was a WS enthusiast (that's why she didn't succeed IMO). She belonged to both FTD and TF, subscribed to both of their cookie-cutter web sites, listed her store under more than two dozens (!) of "also served as" towns. That's how she was runing the busienss. Barely profittable. About 45% of her revenue was from filling for wire-ins. She had very little wire-outs, about 1/5 of wire-ins.

Right after we took over the operation 9 months ago, there was a predictable, significant plunge of local orders. As the result, at one point, 60% of our revenue was coming from filling wire-in orders (outgoing was about 10%). With this kind of totally unbalanced revenue structure, it was simply impossible for me to just cut off the wire-in orders.

It's getting better now, currently 35% of our revenue is from wire-ins, but is still quite significant. I am waiting until it becomes below 20-25%. At that point, I will seriously consider participating in some kind of OG boycott. I think that's the right thing to do.

As I said before wire services should be paying the filling florists for the priviledge of using their resources.. I never really understood why the top sendors got the fancy trips when it is the top receivers that are the most valuable part of our industry. I guess the answer is with the shops that are in the position of having to fill orders to pay next months rent..
short term cash flow at the expense of long term fiscal health

Exactly. See above. We are in a sense "forced" to fill wire-ins just to pay the next month's rent and, by doing so, became trapped by WS.

However, I do believe that there is a way out. As a new florist, we don't have many loyal clients to offend so can do things that many established florists are too afraid to do, like store-name change. Established florists are also often too slow to adapt to the new reality such as Internet. We are trying to take advantage of that.

 

[goldfish]

If the logic of your reasons were to hold true. Then You need to answer the question as to why so many of us refuse to fill those very same orders????

That's because many of you have less exposure to OGs than we do, so that cutting them off wasn't as big a deal as would be the case for us.

Or, some of you probably have a higher ethical standard than ours. Possible. I do respect florists who have sacrificed their own income or market share, holding onto the principle that no real florists should fill for OGs. My common sense tells me, however, that they are rare.

For us, the issue of whether or not to fill for OGs is a business decision. In other words, even if we "ended up" participating on the boycott, that's also a business decision.

Finally, since some people mention it....

As to the business ethics in general, like everyone here, I do belive in business ethics. However, ethics always has a boundary beyond which there is no simple ethical solution. We do not cheat customers. That's our boundary. Beyond that, case by case.

For example, is anyone here washing insectcide-spayed flowers before giving them to a customer? That would be the most "ethical" thing to do because of the possible ill effect of those chemicals. Do I think we "should" do it? I don't and don't consider myself unethical at all. Too much work for probably a tiny benefit. Reasobale people can agree to disagree without labelling each other unethical.

 

[Mikey the Flower Guy]

Holeeeee...Goldfish....

yer all over the place!!
Why do we complicate things with such great enthusiasm??
Seems to me that florists make decisions based on their emotional perspectives, AFTER they've been pushed out the door!! (eg., "why do I continue to fill these money losing orders"??)
This is pretty simple...FLORISTS CAN WIN THIS BATTLE!!
We shut down OG's and dOG's access to our skills and delivery networks, and we shut down the OG's and dOG's.
You think for one minute THEY are concerned about how YOU FEEL??
If EVERY SINGLE "fulfillment" florist, that belongs to a WS set their 'incoming minimums" high enough, there would be chaos in dOGgy land.
Then , YOU could choose to bend your pricing structure to help out other florists, AND, have the "horsepower" to demand more money from the DOT's and OG's.....it's in print.
Let's face it.......florists are lazy, hard working logistical wimps!!
We're SMART enough to see trees in the forest, and too lazy to cut a PATH through them, to reach our goals/destinations!!
I can JUST IMAGINE...all the laughter in the board rooms of the wire services, order gatherers, and profit thieves....."FLORISTS???...they'll NEVER GET IT!!"
OK...are we gonna boycott??

 

[goldfish]

Since no one is answering this question

Are you willing to discount your local orders by 40% (since that's what the real cost of WS orders generally nets out to) to keep your staff busy?

Your question is, well, questionably phrased.

Anyway, yes, we are willing to discount our local orders by 40% under certain conditions. But we won't do this just to keep our staff busy. We do this, only when the alternative (not taking these discount orders at all) would be worse.

Suppose your shop has only one big account, $10,000 a month in sale. Your business depends on this customer. One day, they demanded you to cut the price in half, or else. Your monthly fixed expense is $5,000 and you have only $2,000 in your bank account right now.

If you refuse their demand, you die next month. If you swallow their demand, you are going to die anyway, but not next month. What are you going to do?

The situation of most "filling florists" is not that different from this example.

Would you even offer that discount to your best accounts to keep them? That's what's happening now by filling for most OGs - only they acquire the buyer's info, not you.

We need to separate two, or maybe three, issues here...

(1) If you are asking us, in general terms, whether or not filling for OGs would make any business sense, I am with you and some others here. I think we should be refusing incoming orders from OGs.

(2) If the question is about ethics, i.e., whether it is ethical to "help" those OGs who are hurting the floral industry, then my opinion is that ethics has a boundary and does not demand self-sacrifice. I make distinction between ethics and what my religion tells me to do (absolute).

So if you can afford boycott of OGs, my opinion is that it would be unethical if you do not boycott (sorry double negative). But if your situation is such that boycott requires a significant sacrifice on your part, ethics does not demand you to boycott. And, people shouldn't call you names in this case.

(3) If the issue is what specific cirsumstances would warrent boycott of OGs, I think a few conditions must be met.

First, your business should not be too dependent on OG orders. If it is and you still boycott them, you are either very courageous or irresponsible, depending on which side of the fence you are in. Either way, you sacrificed self and your business... for what?

Two, for boycott to have any actual impact, I mean, not just to make yourself feel good, you probably need to act together with other florists in your locality. Has anyone done that? This is probably the hardest part.

 

[BOSS]

You forgot about Walmart's Everyday delivery price of $9.94. (I just checked it on their site). Now your $39.95 order becomes a $49.xx order.

Joe

Wonder if they have that charge "in stores"?...anyway my original perception that I do not want my name on an item orders/bought at Walmart still stands...

 

[BOSS]

I'm really surprised that not one person responded to my concerns about W/S fulfillment centers. If enough florists "refuse the orders", they are absolutely the next step. Doesn't that concern anyone?

Fulfillment c enters, from the numbers that have been shared with me, by the company that was the first to start them only work in the Top 50 Markets, and maybe the Top 75.

Yes they do concern me, however that said, I do not think we will see a huge expansion in them, as more and more direct ship is taking a bite out of them as well, and fewer LFC's are needed to cover more area. Even the LFC I am extreamly familiar with is now doing all the direct ship covering much of the East Coast from one location.

It takes aproximately $2MM/year in delivered product to justify an LFC, I think most locations that can support this volume already have an LFC or a local florist acting like one.

 

[BOSS]

It's getting better now, currently 35% of our revenue is from wire-ins, but is still quite significant. I am waiting until it becomes below 20-25%. At that point, I will seriously consider participating in some kind of OG boycott. I think that's the right thing to do.

I'm sure that has alot to do with everyones thoughts toward a wire service...

In my case, a wire service represents less than a 9% portion of my total business. I can see where if it represented more, I might have a different outlook.

And yes, more so for me, it is about ethics and truth in advertising and much more...

 

[flowerknife+us]

Fulfillment c enters, from the numbers that have been shared with me, by the company that was the first to start them only work in the Top 50 Markets, and maybe the Top 75.

Yes they do concern me, however that said, I do not think we will see a huge expansion in them, as more and more direct ship is taking a bite out of them as well, and fewer LFC's are needed to cover more area. Even the LFC I am extreamly familiar with is now doing all the direct ship covering much of the East Coast from one location.

It takes aproximately $2MM/year in delivered product to justify an LFC, I think most locations that can support this volume already have an LFC or a local florist acting like one.

I vision the rammifications of having no distribution services for all the markets below the top 50. It leaves alot of squares empty in both Blue and Red States.

If one were to buy a pound of Swiss Cheese with with these kind of holes in it. The stack of slices would have to be a couple of Meters High.

 

[Mikey the Flower Guy]

This is NOW....

a record thread!!
From all appearances, we STILL have a long way to go, in determining our futures in this industry.
The number of "LFC's" INCLUDING florist shops that fill unprofitable orders, are beginning to decline, and the plain reason is many florists are wonderful masocists...they "enjoy" the pain of hard work, long hours, and moral commitment, with the greatest hope that "someone" will come along, and pat them on the back for all their loving products and services!!
I see TWO sides, and two sides ONLY!

1) Most florists will fail rapidly...unknowing what really happened.
2) The remainder of florists WILL succeed VERY SLOWLY, because rapid change is NOT ALWAYS followed by rapid success!!

There are TOO MANY "officially sanctioned" florist shops, because wire services have brainwashed their members into believing that they are somehow "important" to their own successes, and that of "other" florists.
There are TOO MANY "officially sanctioned" NON FLORISTS, that believe THEY have the "right" to demand that YOU fill THEIR orders as THEY see fit!
There are TOO MANY "parasitic" floral directories, that "promise" unsuspecting florists great wealth and order volumes, in return for UPFRONT HARD CASH!!
There are TOO FEW florists that understand the "principals" of the "value" of incoming orders...some are VERY GOOD at what they do, and are consistently broke, waiting for that monthly "cheque"(check) to help tide them over.
There are TOO FEW florists that "band together" in numbers high enough, to have an "impact" on the controversies in our industry.
There are TOO MANY florists that "expect" their suppliers and service providers to offer "leniency" for their financial inadequacies.
There are TOO MANY florists, with TOO MANY opinions to form an "arrow" pointing in ONE DIRECTION!!

 

[Sher]

Spot on Mikey!

 

[CHR]

Mikey - Excellent list!

May I add....
Too many florists and sellers making problems instead of creating happy senders & recipients - let alone allowing for break-even on the filling side. Of the last five incoming orders we received:

- one was perfect - correct address, good description, appropriate dollars
- two were for codified items we don't carry
- one was for such an usual request that we'd have had to go shopping to get the items, had no second choice and was sold by an OG that says they 'deliver' in our town on all their doorway pages.
- one was from a real florist and was/is going to the biggest employer here. The phone number provided is answered by a fax machine, the recipient's name is likely misspelled and the address provided is the company's PO box.

So out of 5 orders, we've only been able to fill one. Three were wasted time caused by the senders and one is still pending but we've spent enough time on it that even if filled, we're doing it at a loss.

We expect florists to fill our orders and pledge to do the same... but some days it's tempting just to become an SFO.

 

[Rhonda]

case and point: Just got off the phone with a person who wanted to send a "wedding style" bouquet of white with light pink flowers - possibly with some roses, no carnations please. I want that delivered after 5 tomorrow as no one is home during the day but it has to be tomorrow and has to be after 5. And with that can you do a small nosegay?
I gave her the 800 numbers to two of the shops there. There was just no way I could 1. guarantee delivery tomorrow after 5
2. give her a concrete price on the wedding style arrangement
3. give her a price on a "nosegay" type addition
She was on someone elses cellphone, no return number to contact her AFTER I called two or three florists to get the information, she sighed at the comments concerning "extra delivery fees" for after 5 and even bigger sigh at $70-80 for an arrangement not counting the "nosegay". That was a complaint waiting to happen on my end as I could not get her to commit. So let her speak with the delivering florist, get the "exact" amounts and charges. She was going to have to put it on a credit card with me anyway.

 

[Golferdude]

Joe, If you fill 10 orders at a average of $50.00ea you would lose 27% or $135.00
If you fill 100 orders at $50.00 less 27% that would be $1350.00
I think I will just pay the $250.00 fees and be happy with zero in comming orders
What I will do with my extra money is give some flowers away to my loyal customers.
Please show me how you make money on incomming orders. My account said you can not make any money on an incomming order.