Florist Services
Today Teleflora and FTD are still the most widely recognized wire services. These companies offered (for a fee of course) flower shop owners to join their service. To belong to a floral service, the florist must follow certain guidelines that have already been established. They provided phone directories to all those belonging to their wire service thusly connecting the flower shops across the country and eventually across the world! They created a pictorial catalogue, if you will, of floral arrangements for different occasions that could be seen in one city, and with one phone call, delivered in another. They still work on that precept today. This floral catalogue will display pictures of different bouquets and give an approximate price nation-wide. Difficult for consumers to understand is that every floral shop sets it’s own price for the floral bouquets. The cost of living affects the pricing of arrangements.
A bouquet in New York City will cost less in a small town in Missouri. The larger the city is, the higher the delivery fee. Florists who belong to either FTD or Teleflora wire service will pay fees for belonging to their service. The sending florist receives a small percentage (approximately 20%) for sending out the order (from the wire service) along with their “wire service call fee” (that fee varies from shop to shop). The receiving florist receives the larger percentage of the money from the order (about 70% from the wire service). Shops are required to carry a certain dollar amount of flowers in their cooler, it must be clean and neat, designers must have a certain amount of experience and shops are not to be without a designer in the shop during the hours they are open.
