Only flower auction
Today, there are exclamations from the crowd, but only because a batch of red indoor flowers has just sold for an unusually high price. “Red. Valentine’s Day,” Sellwig remarks.
It’s about midway through the auction and, at the edge of the warehouse floor, two trolleys are pushed aside. “These are no offer,” says Sellwig, gesturing at buckets of eucalyptus leaves. They look fine to me but to Sellwig’s expert eye they are not up to scratch. Unsold stock is destroyed to prevent it finding its way back into the market. “It’s to ensure everything is as fair as possible,” he says.
Behind the auction hall there is a flurry of activity. Here, most of Multiflora’s 120 employees pack flowers on to conveyer belts, which assists in sorting each buyer’s order.
As each bid is concluded, just outside the auction hall a machine prints the bid details on to stickers. Staffers formulaically place a sticker on each bucket on a trolley.
After the sorting process on the conveyer belt is concluded, each buyer will find the trolleys with their purchases placed in a particular sequence in the warehouse, ready to be wheeled away — once they have paid for them.
“It’s a buzz of activity now,” says Pretorius. “But by 10.30am, 11am, it starts getting dead. Eventually it is like a ghost town.”
She says buyers need to get out with their purchases as quickly as possible as they still have a full day of trading ahead of them.
Other trolleys are wheeled from the warehouse into an attached mall next door. Here a few flower agents sell directly to the public.
Jason’s Flowers is one of the businesses renting space in the mall. Jason Xavier, a director and part of the second generation to run this family business, says the prices of flowers in his store change in real time on the shop floor. “While the auction is going on, I am buying. But I am also feeding the new prices back to the guys.”
He points to a white avalanche of roses, which he bought on auction the day before. “I speculated. I thought it was a good price so I bought a lot.”
Today, the same variety sold on auction for a higher price, allowing Xavier to put up the price on his shop floor. It’s a gamble because the opposite could happen; a lower auction price would mean the price on the shop floor would have to drop, too, to be competitive.