Originally Posted by tony

u mean every month lol

but on a serious note its a huge problem with many wholesalers

the biggest problem is with late orders that one has to buy from some of the larger cash and carries in holland because at 2 in the afternoon they are the only ppl with the stock and often that stock is old and we dont know when it was bought.

I handle stock in differant ways if someone orders flowers in advance i will always use that days auction flowers (the only real exception being on certain wedding lines which i will often buy on a monday rather than tuesday auction, crystal blush calla for example will often be a lot cheaper on a monday) . At the moment i am sitting in the office working out my buy list for mondays auction for tuesdays orders and general stock requirement.

The problem is with my roling stock in the wharehouses u florists expect me to carry the stock risk for your shops a lot of the time, which means u want us to have everything all of the time . The way i look at it overall is in terms of stock value to turnover rate . I try to make sure that our stock value is never more than double our daily turnover. However we all know what its like on a normal week i would expect to sell about a 1000 red roses a day but some weeks for no real reason red rose sales drop off and we have too much stock so i will have bought for the following day when i dont need them. What i do is "hide" that fresh stock and sell roses that are a day older than they should be. the only alternative is to increase margins . The other really important thing is to be honest with customers about the age of stock (and i dont mean when things are just a day old lol)and not to keep cold stores too cold to hide the age. I find that if u cold store roses they look perfect for ages but 2 days later are crap . The same roses kept at about 12 C look slightly open after a few days but still have good vase life and are perfect for funeral work.

i just wish i could just sell ordered flowers then my life would be easy lol