We are a florist, and I know food industry works with the same thing, but dealing with how quickly flowers "spoil" (are too open to be used) is something that is very difficult for us. This, coupled with rising prices at the wholesaler, really makes it difficult. Something I think is pretty unique to floral are the Wire Services. Wire Services (Teleflora and FTD, among others) collect orders on a national level (through their website or other avenues) and distribute them to florists in the area where the orders are to be delivered. They also allow Florists to send orders directly to each other. The problem with wire services is you have huge companies like From You Flowers, Avas Flowers, and others who are online only, and only send orders. They don't actually care about how much an order should cost, they just want to discount as much as possible to get the most customers. This is because of the way the Wire Services collect their cut of each order. The company who sends the order gets 20% and pays no fees. The company making and delivering the order gets 80%, then minus 10% in one fee, and $7.5 in another fee. This is only exacerbated by the fact the big companies under price their arrangements to get the customers in, but just pass those discounts to the end florist whos profit margin has already shrunk.
We are also a plant store, and because we're newer (December 2020) and don't want huge amounts of plants at this point, most wholesalers don't want to work with us (to maintain stock for their current customers or because shipping costs too much).
Even with these challenges we're still doing really well, and have grown much more than we expected. We've gotten to the point where we are receiving more orders than we can handle most times and it's a great problem to have. But staffing also isn't easy because we are a family business and it's hard to relinquish some of the control we have by hiring new people. It's not easy when you care so much about each customer and each order (even if it didn't originate with us) and you're not sure if someone else would feel the same. Not to mention, Florists are not a dime a dozen. They're expensive and it's very difficult to find one who's as good as our current.
We'll keep working harder and more efficiently to be a better business in general, and are super excited for what the future holds for us. Thanks for asking, and it feels good to put it all out there, even if most people won't care.
