The Flower Market

When Brian arrived, he said he wanted to see this "flower market in Aalsmeer" he'd read about in his book. Amsterdam has a handful of flower markets, including the famous 'floating' market, but the market in Aalsmeer is less tents and shopkeepers and more of a market in the stock market sense.


The Bloemenveiling Aalsmeer is the giant auction house where over 6000 growers sell their flowers and plants to over 1000 buyers and exporters. The building itself is one of the largest in the world, with over 10 million square feet of space and its own rail line. Inside there are 4 large auction rooms where buyers use a high-to-low bidding method (more on that in a sec) to buy the flowers.


The flowers are stacked on carts and run through the room as two auctioneers talk about each flower, answer questions, and occasionally pull them out to demonstrate quality. In a typical day, the auction house sells over 20 million flowers and plants.


The bidding is controlled through computers and runs off this clock system, where the numbers are the price and it runs from high to low. This means the buyers try to wait for the price to drop, but the first bid sets the price. If you click on the picture below, you'll see a red dot at the 40 mark (around 5 o'clock on the clock face). The red dot travels from the 1 position (12 o'clock) counter-clockwise very, very quickly. This plant has just been purchased for 40 cents per plant. All the other numbers on the clock face list the quantity of plants and other information.


It is an incredibly fast system. There are over 60,000 sales a day and something like 300 transactions a minute (there are 4 auction rooms, each with two clocks). The flowers seldom stop moving through the room and the clock jumps directly to the next sale. It's a pretty calm system, though we did watch one guy maniacally jam his laptop as he tried to place a bid. He didn't get it.

There's not much to the tour. Mostly you walk along a catwalk above the floor and watch flower carts move here and there with occasional automated stations that explain the action. But the sheer volume of flowers makes it worth the trip. The market basically sets the prices for much of the European flower market and is a huge influence on the worldwide price of roses, as nearly 2 billion roses a year flow through Aalsmeer. Not a bad way to spend half a morning, if you don't mind getting up early to catch the bus. We'll get some more pictures on our Flickr page soon.