Long winter affects flower businesses

By Miriam Ostermann, Associate Editor

With even more snow on the horizon forecasted for the coming weeks, Alberta florists and flower shops are facing a double-edged sword; reaping the rewards in their busy season while combating numerous delivery delays and spending more labour and materials prepping arrangements for frigid temperatures.
Strathmore’s Florist, which has operated within the town for four decades, had to deal with multiple delivery delays this winter along with the consistent need to wrap their floral arrangements – up to -40 weather – in comparison to previous years. While the issues were more dominant this year than previously, winter is considered the busy season and the store was able to work around the obstacles to prevent them from impacting the business.
“Winter is actually good for business in most respects unless you get specific bad weather incidents or incidents of extreme cold, (but) there’s no outdoor flowers and people still need the touch of the Earth so that’s the time of year when we’re just busier than summer,” said Brian Code, owner of Strathmore’s Florist.
“It’s the slides, the snow, the road closures and avalanche control. Sometimes the road was closed for days; those were some issues. And then it’s just a matter of whether your flower shipment happened to skip through on one of the alternate routes or not.
“The worst issue this winter was, because we had so much cold weather compared to the last few years, we spent a ton of time simply wrapping flowers. Normally we don’t wrap deliveries unless the weather dictates it. Maybe winters we don’t wrap our delivers for half the time. This winter that never happened once.”
Code added that the cold weather and fog also caused delays in the growing season for specific flowers, such as lilies.
Strathmore’s Florist orders direct shipments from British Columbia, various places around the world, and still orders their seasonal lilies from Brooks, while most of their wholesalers are in Calgary. This past season, deliveries had been delayed nearly 15 times already and in rare instances the products’ limited shelf life was exceeded.
However, other businesses in town that carry flower arrangements, such as the Strathmore CO-OP which receives their flowers from Calgary, had no trouble with their deliveries yet noticed a decrease in sales this year.
“This year because of the cold weather sales have dropped off a bit,” said Karen Pirri, produce manager at the Strathmore CO-OP.
“They’re not selling as well as they did last year because of the cold weather, the long winter, the fog we have out here and road closures, and that doesn’t help the season. People just aren’t buying them, people are not in the spirit.”
With the sun poking through as of late, Code looked at the brighter side of things. “It’s kind of the normal course, it could be much worse, we could be in the Maritimes where I bet you 50 per cent of the time they have winter storms on Valentine’s Day.”