Local

The Job You Don’t Want in Atlanta Today: Florist

February 14th, 2014

Valentine’s Day is always big for those who design and deliver flowers. This week’s snow and ice storm has forced Atlanta-area florists into overdrive.Broadcast Version

Scott Wieler, who owns Maud Baker Flowers in Decatur, has 70 drivers, eight designers and four processors that handle every order. And he hopes they’ll get 900 flower arrangements delivered today despite missing two days of production time.

“Normally we are nice, neat, calm and organized, and everything’s out on the roads by noon,” said Wieler. “This is a lot more chaotic in because we just haven’t been able mass produce the arrangements that were needed to fill the orders coming in.”

So he cut off taking new orders around 9:45 a.m. And as for his eight designers?

“They’re not very happy,” Wieler says with a small laugh. “But they came in knowing that this was going to be a stressful day. And they’ve all got a smile on their face, and they’re working as hard as they can.”

Wieler anticipated the heavy work load, but once his drivers got on the roads this morning, they found a new problem. “Nobody is working a full today is what we’re finding out,” said Wieler. “And they are calling us and wanting us to stop the order and then reroute it to a different address. You know, it’s just a mess.”

Logistics aren’t nearly as much of a problem at Pollen, a much smaller flower shop in Buckhead. According to Pollen owner Chris Condon, “things are calm, and then it gets crazy, and then it’s calm. At this exact moment, we’re sort of calm.”

Condon expects he’ll sell about 60 arrangements today. But that is a lot for what is usually a two-person operation. Condon says he didn’t have the extra help he usually does leading up Valentine’s Day, so he and his wife Bonnie went into storm prep mode. “I went home really quick actually on Tuesday afternoon and loaded up all our luggage and raided our refrigerator and came back with all our supplies so we could hunker down before it got bad.”

The Condons have a crash pad in the shop, and he said Wednesday was especially productive. “It was a lot of work to do,” he admits. “But with the phones not ringing and no customers, it was actually a kind of a calm day to prep flowers on Wednesday as opposed to normally a whole week of stress.”

Back at Maud Baker, where Scott Wieler says he’s reassessing the situation every 20 minutes to reallocate resources, he asks just one thing: “Please be patient.” For Wieler, the day after the storm is turning out to be a bit of a perfect storm.