The Published Record
What the Press Is Saying
These aren't our claims. Begin in one small town, on the street where a florist watched the shop across the road close, and listen to her explain why. Then look wider — at what the national press, the trade journals, and the industry's own associations have been reporting for years, across America and across the world. Every item below is drawn from a published source, and linked.
I.
On Main Street
North Branch, Minnesota
In January 2017, a florist named Cindy Gregoire sat down to write about her competitor. Not to gloat — to mourn. The shop across town had closed the month before, and she wanted her customers to understand why.
North Branch Floral
January 2017
Shop Owner
"There is nothing more exciting than a downtown that can support two flower shops. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case."
Gregoire wrote that she was sad to relay that her competitor, Wildflowers, had just closed its doors — a vibrant, exciting shop that brought daily deliveries and thoughtful expressions to downtown North Branch.
Then she explained the arithmetic. Almost half the flower orders arriving in her town come through the national ordering networks known as wire services — companies that take a customer's order and payment, then pass it to a local shop to fill. Those orders reach local shops at a fraction of the amount paid. Most of the time, she wrote, below her own cost. On a hundred-dollar order, the local florist receives less than fifty.
"Consider the impact to your community if you did that with other services that you depend on."
Her request was not that customers buy from her. It was that they buy from someone local. It doesn't have to be us, she wrote — but we are here to serve you and our community.
Cindy Gregoire, North Branch Floral, 6138 Main Street, North Branch, Minnesota. Published January 6, 2017. Her shop is still open.
Read what she wrote
Plymouth, Michigan
June 2020
Four Decades
"Back in the day, you used to come to a florist because that's who sold flowers."
Ribar Floral Company had stood at 728 S. Main since the early 1980s. Lori Morrison worked there after high school, left for other work, and came back when the founder telephoned and offered her the business. She and her mother bought it in 2000 and ran it for nearly twenty years.
When she closed the doors, she named the change plainly. The world is different now, she said. You used to come to a florist because that was who sold flowers.
"That's not really the case now. Everyone sells it."
The woman who founded the shop still lives down the street from the building that carries her name.
Lori Morrison, Ribar Floral Company, Plymouth, Michigan. Reported by Hometown Life, republished by Florists' Review, June 2020.
Read the story
II.
Across America
The same account, in every state
What Cindy Gregoire described in a small Minnesota town, the national press has documented across the country. And it is not history. This investigation aired five months ago.
CBS News New York
February 2026
Investigation
A shop owner of twenty years, taking the blame for a website that isn't hers
Luisa Amaral owns Ruth Chase Flowers, an award-winning family-run shop in New Milford, Connecticut. For the first time in nearly two decades of business, she began receiving customer complaints — except the customers were not hers. They belonged to a website called Ruth's Roses. When people searched for a number to reach it, hers appeared instead.
Ruth's Roses claims four decades serving its community. CBS found it also claiming to be local to Jersey City and Red Bank. It is registered in Nevada. Nearly five hundred complaints have reached the Better Business Bureau. Of more than 1,300 Yelp reviews, ninety-nine percent award a single star. One customer wrote that the roses she paid for never reached her mother's funeral.
"I'm just concerned about our reputation."
CBS asked Google what could be done for Ruth Chase Flowers. Google replied that it does not manually determine rankings — the system weighs hundreds of factors, among them whether the words in a search match the keywords on a page.
Reported by Lisa Rozner, CBS News New York, February 12, 2026.
Read the investigation
CNBC
2013
National Press
"The local florist market has been shrinking for years."
The national business press has tracked this for more than a decade. CNBC reported, citing Society of American Florists data, that the number of independent flower shops fell by roughly 37% between 2000 and 2011 — pressured by supermarkets, large chain stores, and online retailers drawing shoppers away from local shops.
CNBC, "Struggling to survive: The disappearance of the flower store," quoting analyst Eric Beder and citing SAF figures.
Read the CNBC report
Society of American Florists
February 2022
Trade Press
The industry's own association reported supermarkets buying entire farms
In SAF's Floral Management, the trade group reported that mass-market floral had grown so much that supermarkets were competing with wholesalers for the very same roses. A Virginia florist told the magazine that while scrambling to source stems, she discovered grocery chains had bought entire farms of flower brands for their own inventory.
Reported by Katie Vincent, senior contributing editor, Society of American Florists — quoting SAF president-elect Oscar Fernandez and florist Holly Heider Chapple.
Read the SAF article
III.
Around the World
Britain, and the pattern beyond it
In Britain the account does not change — only the language it is told in. Britain has lost its shops faster than America has, by the same mechanism Cindy Gregoire described.
Florist Trade Magazine · National Florist Day
United Kingdom
Trade Press
Britain has lost roughly a third of its shopfront florists since 2016
The UK's floral trade press, drawing on its own long-running industry database, counts a fall from more than 8,000 traditional shopfront flower shops — what the British call high street florists — in 2016 to around 5,500 today. During the Brexit transition, the British Florist Association reported closures running at as many as five a week.
Florist Trade Magazine / National Florist Day, "Facts, Figures & Timelines," citing its own database and Rabobank.
See the UK figures
Rabobank
2021 data
Cross-Country
Where supermarkets take the market, the florist disappears
The pattern is visible across borders. Rabobank's figures put supermarkets at roughly 54% of all UK flower sales — the highest share of any country in the world — against about 20% in the Netherlands and around 14% in France. The UK trade press notes this creates pressures unlike those anywhere else: at peak season, supermarket buying power can put flowers on the shelf below what a florist pays at wholesale.
Three countries. Three very different percentages. One correlation.
Rabobank 2021 figures, as reported by Florist Trade Magazine / National Florist Day.
See the comparison
IV.
The Numbers
Behind every closed door
12,154U.S. retail florist shops (SAF, 2022), down from roughly 27,000 a generation ago
8,000 → 5,500UK high street florists, 2016 to today (Florist Trade Magazine)
54%Share of UK flower sales going to supermarkets — the highest in the world (Rabobank)
V.
The Other Argument
What the industry says about itself
The Hardest Case Against Us
"Is the flower shop business model broken?"
That is the headline the industry's own flagship magazine ran, and the argument beneath it deserves a hearing — because it is the strongest case against everything above.
It is easy, Florists' Review wrote, to blame the usual suspects: the internet, the supermarkets, the wire services, and the order gatherers — websites that pose as a local shop they have no connection to. But something more fundamental is happening. Consumers are choosing with their money. Florists have resisted lowering their prices, and a fifty-dollar minimum plus delivery excludes anyone without seventy to spend, while supermarkets succeed at an average under twenty. And while ten thousand flower shops closed in a decade, three thousand painting studios opened.
The magazine's own answer to its headline was no — the model is not broken, but the trade must do better. It closed by recalling that people once declared the coffee business dead, until someone reinvented it. Innovation, it concluded, is the key to succeeding in a declining market.
We agree with nearly all of it. We would only name the thing the magazine did not.
Florists' Review, "Is the Flower Shop Business Model Broken?", published February 2019. (The magazine's online version of this article currently displays with formatting errors.)
VI.
It All Comes Down to Proper Industry Marketing
Everyone sells flowers. Only a florist has the knowledge.
Everyone sells flowers now, as the florist in Plymouth said. So flowers cannot be what a florist sells. What remains is the knowledge, the skill, and the experience of the person who arranged them — and none of that has ever been marketed to anyone.
The trade has spent a century marketing the flower and almost no time marketing the florist. Every campaign sells the bloom — the feeling, the gesture, the occasion. None explains why the person who arranged it matters. So the customer learns that flowers are a product, and a product is bought wherever it is cheapest. A supermarket shelf satisfies that lesson perfectly.
Knowledge is knowing which stem, sourced from where, opening on which day. Skill is what the hands do with it. Experience is having stood across the counter from a grieving family, and from a bride, and knowing that these require different things. None of that is the flower. All of it is the florist. And it has never been advertised — nor can it be, by one shop alone.
Consider what has quietly happened to the customer. A generation ago, a person walked into a shop, described the occasion, and a florist built something for it. Today the same person expects to choose a pre-made bouquet from a photograph. The ready-made bouquet became the default — not because anyone decided it was better, but because it is what the supermarket shelf, the wire service catalogue, and the order gatherer's website could all sell at scale. The customer was never told there was another way. They simply stopped being offered one.
That is a habit, and habits can be taught. Two industries have already proven it — and neither did it one shop at a time. No single café taught the world about origin and roast. No lone vineyard invented the appellation. In both cases an entire trade decided, together, to educate the public about the person and the craft behind the product — the roaster, the grower, the maker — rather than advertise the product itself. No individual business could have afforded to build that knowledge alone, and none would have benefited if it had. That is the lesson the floral industry has never learned.
Coffee was once a cheap commodity, sold by weight and chosen by price. Then a whole generation of roasters — not one of them, all of them — began teaching people about origin, about roasting, and about the person who prepared the cup. Analysts now credit these coffee houses, collectively, with educating consumers, and credit that education with creating the demand. They did not sell the bean. They sold the barista, the farmer, the craft. The category they built together is worth well over a hundred billion dollars.
Wine went further, through institutions rather than advertising. Appellations are a shared standard, agreed by growers together. The sommelier is a profession the trade created, certified, and sent out to explain itself. Over a century of collective education, an industry took a fermented agricultural product and taught the public that where it was grown, who made it, and how it was handled were worth paying for. Two bottles of the same grape, from the same year, now fetch wildly different prices — and the customer can tell you why. That knowledge was built, deliberately, by an industry acting as one.
Wine also carries a warning. Three in four consumers say they find the rules of wine intimidating. When education becomes a display of superior taste, it does not attract the customer. It makes them feel ignorant, and they leave. The task is not to shame anyone for buying a simple bunch of flowers. It is to make them curious about what else was possible.
Flowers have been given neither. No appellation, no vocabulary, no education — only a picture of a bouquet and a price. The custom arrangement can return the way coffee and wine returned: not by competing with a twenty-dollar supermarket bouquet, but by making the case that a piece made for your mother, by a person who knew the flowers, is worth somewhat more than a bunch made for nobody in particular. Price resistance is not the obstacle. Nobody has ever made the argument.
And no shop can make it alone. Cindy Gregoire asked her town to buy from local shops — one florist, writing to one community, against a system with a marketing budget. The roasters did not each write to their own towns. They spoke as an industry, about the people who do the work. Until the floral trade does the same, every florist will keep making Cindy's argument by herself, and losing it by herself. That is what a commission is for.
VII.
Further Reading
The wider conversation
This conversation has run for years, in many languages — in trade journals, the national press, and the blogs of working florists. Sources outside the United States appear first. Several are not in English; that is the point.
Sources are linked above and open in a new tab. Publications and figures are attributed to their authors; the World Cut Flower Commission has quoted them briefly and in context. If you are a florist with a story of your own, we want to hear it. That is the whole point of this Commission.
