Title: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Caused a Flower Shortage - FTD.com
Headings: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Caused a Flower Shortage
How the COVID-19 Pandemic Caused a Flower Shortage
Large Supply Without Demand
Transportation Issues
Poor Weather Conditions Results in Low Flower Inventory
Can I Still Get Flowers?

Content: The pandemic flower shortage is the result of some bad growing weather and a trickle-down effect of shut-down related issues that have caused backups in a number of worldwide industries. Large Supply Without Demand
Florists and large retailers receive their flowers from a variety of both large and small growing farms around the world, including the United States, South America, and the Netherlands. These farms have their projected flower demands and plant accordingly each year to supply to their buyers. When the worldwide pandemic started shutting down businesses in 2020, the projected demand based on previous “normal” years for those flowers hit a brick wall. Offices, restaurants, and retailers that usually had large, long-standing orders for flowers no longer needed them. For some growers, this meant that the demand for their flowers stock was cut by nearly 95%, forcing many farmers to give away their overstock they couldn’t sell, or simply letting them die in the fields at a tremendous loss. This was an especially difficult issue for larger growing farms that employed hundreds of employees to tend to their large crop of flowers. Once the demand for the flowers was taken away, so was the money that was expected from those now non-existent sales. The dominos continued to fall with growers forced to lay off large amounts of workers and suffer their own staggering financial loss. Many larger growing farms in California and South America had to shut down their growing operations and sell their farms because they no longer had the capital or labor to continue to run.