Coronavirus: Canada catches up to US in giving out first doses of vaccine – as it happened
Last March, G Page Wholesale Flowers in Manhattan pulled down its shutters along with New York’s other non-essential businesses and left stems wrapped in brown paper on the footpath for passers-by.
More than a year later, owner Gary Page is upbeat as he looks forward to rosier times, even as sales at his flower business are about half of what they were before the coronavirus pandemic struck.
People are swarming to his store in search of peonies, ranunculuses and calla lilies and he believes the pandemic has turned more people towards nature. He projects a return to pre-pandemic levels by early next year.
“If everyone is comfortable with large indoor gatherings”, he says, by the autumn “we should be off and running. Wearing my optimistic hat, it may be early 2022 [that] we are back up to 2019 levels.”
Page, who has been in the industry since 1984, says the Covid-19 pandemic kept his flower district shop closed for three months and is the worst crisis his business has faced, even tougher than the September 11 2001 terror attacks and the 2008-9 financial crash. For wholesalers like him, who primarily sell to luxury florists such as Miho and Ovando and rely on hospitality events, business looked grim last year.
He credits the Paycheck Protection Program, the US government’s pandemic-relief loans for small companies, with getting his business through the worst of the pandemic via two tranches of $168,000 loans.
His business struggled as costs shot up. The pandemic made it more expensive to bring flowers to the US as international flights were mostly grounded.
Flowers from France and Italy could be sent by road to the Netherlands and then shipped from there, but it was harder to bring in blooms from Malaysia and Thailand. That led to a surge in freight costs that he had to pass on to his customers.
Still, Page says demand has blossomed and more people have appreciated nature, especially those city dwellers who felt stuck indoors, and he sees this as a post-pandemic legacy that will flourish.
“We had the industrial revolution, which took us off the agrarian land,” he says. “Now we have the technological revolution where we have become separated from what is around us.”
He thinks the disconnect, which was heightened by the pandemic, led people to spruce their homes up with more plants and flowers that “can create such emotion in people” and have been a counterweight to loneliness.
And these purchases in turn have created educated consumers who can distinguish the quality of flowers and make more informed purchases.
“There’s the Men’s Wearhouse suit and there’s the Brioni suit,” Page says.
This is the fourth in a series for the blog that explores the effects of the pandemic on people and businesses around the world