The detached society: why personnel is more and more turning from an asset into 'a drag' for companies and why it is perfectly normal nowadays to run a multi billion euro company without having blue collar workers!

It was a small snippet in an in every respect quite interesting article in ‘Het Financieele Dagblad’ about the new distribution centre of online retail giant Bol.com in The Netherlands, that really caught my attention while reading.

In a few, well-chosen words, this snippet painted a tell-tale description of the situation on the Dutch and international labour market nowadays:

Bol.com symbolizes a rapidly changing economy.Yet, the construction process of the new distribution centre also shows that companies themselves do less and less. Bol.com employees never touch a parcel with their own hands. When the distribution centre starts its operation next year, employees of Docdata will put the ordered product in boxes. And parcel delivery service PostNL will bring the products to the customer.

Also Van Wijnen, the main contractor responsible for the construction of the distribution centre, has hardly any of their own people walking around on the terrain. The company guides 50 subcontractors and suppliers, which are all specialized in one particular part of the building process. Project manager Pieter Lammé at Van Wijnen is one of the few people who has a clear view on the big picture during the construction activities. He does that in close cooperation with project manager Joost Poelgeest of bol.com.

“When I started at Van Wijnen, 38 years ago, we still had masons, concrete workers, painters, crane operators and installers on our payroll”, according to Lammé. ‘Nowadays, we outsource all this specialist labour to other companies and freelancers. We are only directing the project’.

This is really shocking, when you let this text sink in to you: 

• The largest online retail company in The Netherlands does not have any of its own staff at all involved in what arguably belongs to its key processes: the collection, distribution and transport of sold merchandise?!
  
•  And probably neither in its most important process: the arrangement and completion of online sales!
  
• One of the largest construction companies in The Netherlands only acts as a director in a feature film, who guides a bunch of leading actors and extras into making a notable performance, but does not feel ultimately involved in the quality of the final result?! 

This means that these huge, multi-million dollar companies are actually liable for the quality of their projects, products and services, but seem not to be responsible for it at all?! 

It is almost like the people of bol.com and Van Wijnen are ‘accidental bystanders' in their own business processes: 

‘They just happen to be there when events happen and they happen to be liable for the proper execution of activities. Nevertheless, they cannot be blamed when things go awry, as their suppliers and independently working staff are actually in the lead during the execution of activities. Not them!’

Sometimes it is nearly impossible to explain 21st century businesses to say..., one’s grandfather or great grandfather. Especially, when this person was firmly based in the 20th century.

Would these two companies just be outliers in their own industry with a particularly “innovative” way of running their business, I would sigh and leave it to be. However, these companies are probably front-runners – the “best-of-breed” – who will soon be followed by their less smart competitors.

Just think about this, when companies like bol.com or Van Wijnen hardly maintain ‘blue collar’ personnel anymore while carrying out their main business, why would other large online and brick & mortar retail store chains, like Zalando, Albert Heijn, C&A, WalMart, Tesco, Lidl and Aldi do that? 

And why would other Dutch construction companies, like BAM, DuraVermeer or BallastNedam, maintain THEIR blue collar staff, when Van Wijnen shows them that they don’t need fixed staff anymore, except for a few-odd controllers, calculators, supervisors, project managers and foremen. 

This way, running a construction company is turning into running a trading and brokerage company; something that one can do, without ever having experience with bricks and mortar, concrete and steel at all. One just needs to bring together the principal with the chosen architecture, suppliers, structural engineers, freelance building professionals and executive engineers, as well as building materials and other supplies. That's all!

And what about the staff themselves, working for these companies? What will be their part in this deal?

Even though the people in the aforementioned bol.com warehouse will work ON BEHALF OF bol.com, they don’t work AT bol.com. And the worrisome part is that this staff probably also does not work at Docdata and PostNL either [the two other companies mentioned in the article – EL]...

Instead, these workers are perhaps (Dutch) people, who are hired via a temporary employment agency to escape from unemployment and boredome or to earn some income as a student. Or they might work at these companies, as ‘not-so-freelancers’ with piece-wages or a zero-hour contract, in order to collect a decent income.

Or perhaps they are foreign workers from Eastern Europe or the Far East. People, who are deployed through (sometimes shady) ‘temporary labour organizations’, whilst hoping for a better future for them and their families.

All these workers have in common that they are only useful as long as they are productive and until the moment that they can be safely replaced by robots, when these have become cheaper, more efficient, more reliable and/or quicker than manual labour.

And the people and companies working on the realization of this massive warehouse on behalf of Van Wijnen?

These are probably either larger subcontractors that let THEIR part of the job do by a bunch of ‘hired guns’ or they are freelancers themselves with a one-man business, being specialized in “something, necessary in the process somewhere”, but not useful anywhere else: working as the ultimate, one-trick pony’s!

What Van Wijnen and bol.com ultimately show is that personnel has turned from an ‘asset’ for companies into a ‘drag’, during the last decade: a burden that these companies can go easily short on, while still successfully running their multi billion dollar business.

Instead of having personnel of their own and on their own payroll, large companies like Van Wijnen and bol.com can nowadays accomplish the fulfilment of a certain task, service or project, by using a small group of subcontractors and one-man businesses. 

Or they can hire their staff via large, specialized service providers (like DocData and PostNL in the case of bol.com), ‘staff brokers’ and temporary labour organizations. In the end, this all can be topped off with an ultimately flexible shell existing of freelancers and zero-hour contract workers, who receive no warranties and a one-month time horizon for their labour efforts.

And probably everything will be secured and warranted with ironclad contracts and ‘service level agreements’ between Van Wijnen and bol.com at one side and their suppliers at the other side. Contracts and service level agreements, in which the demanded achievements and performance levels are described ‘to a T’; probably with draconian penalties for errors, general underperformance and/or workers dropping out or not showing up at all.

In the world of these companies, it seems like workers are nothing more than sustainable means of production that are deployed just for what they can do and not for who they are and what they bring with them, like brains, passion and dedication. Instead of intangible assets on the asset side of the balance sheet, such workers have turned into simple costs and expenses on the P&L table: Labour-as-a-Service!

“If people from Poland don’t work hard enough anymore to meet our performance goals, we will settle for Ukrainians or Romanians. Labour circumstances? Fair remuneration? Chances for a career, trainings and personal growth and development for these workers?! It is not our deal anymore. We pay our suppliers a fair price per item and what they pay to or do with their workers, is totally not our problem!”

And so it could turn out in this situation that the only people caring for their personnel, is the personnel itself: everybody is the owner of his own business, aka himself. All the others are none of his business, as they all need to take care of themselves.

This means: 

• There is no other responsibility for the health and wellbeing of workers for hiring companies than the absolute minimum that is required by law. This is in practice the bare minimum for which the principal company or ultimate employer is liable and not much more;
  
• There is no shared past and no mutual future between companies and their staff, as such workers can come and go and don’t bring any legacy or future obligations with them;
  
• There is no mutual solidarity between both parties:
  
• The worker does not feel responsible for any other part of the work / project than the simple part for which he is directly responsible. When the whole project or service fails, and he is not to blame for that, he does not care;
  
• The company does not feel responsible for the general well-being and future deployability of their workers, as they are only loosely connected for the time span of their contract.
  
• There is no moral obligation for the ultimate employer to find better / other employment, when jobs, projects or services are finished, or when a particular job does not fit a certain worker anymore;
  
•  Staff is hired for a certain job and when they can’t do that job satisfactorily anymore or when they are outperformed by others, they can simply be replaced.
  
• It is not the company’s responsibility anymore to put the right people at the right place. The right people for a job might stay, while the wrong people are released from the job at will; 
• And last, but not least: there is no burden or sacrifice at all in having their own personnel for these modern employers. Their workers are just a small figure on their P&L sheet and not a long term obligation / commitment of their company. 

I would like to call this situation in the business industry ‘the detached society’: a society in which interconnectedness, compassion, a shared past and future, as well as mutual responsibility between employers and workers are seen as ‘weaknesses, being bad for business’, instead of strenghts...

Such a detached society would make extremely successful and yet compassionate entrepreneurs like Frits Philips, Tomáš en Antonin Baťa, Freddy Heineken, Andrew Carnegie, George Eastman or Henry Ford feel ashamed. 

These were people who were all very focused and extremely innovative entrepreneurs, but yet had a profound feeling of responsibility for the health and physical/mental wellbeing of their personnel and for the society in which they operated, which they showed in many different areas and ways.

These entrepreneurs showed their compassion, by delivering to their workers and the societies in which they lived:

• better and safer labour circumstances;
• better housing and hygienic infrastructure ('Bata villages');
• better healthcare, when this was yet far from fashionable;
• better education and more chances for underprivileged people;
• cultural and sportive entertainment and leisure activities; 

What would these great, visionary entrepreneurs think about this ‘outsourcing of responsibility, mutual care and interconnectedness’, that is currently going on in the 21st Century?

Would they endorse this development and go with this flow? Or would they veto this way of doing business, knowing that in the end this is ‘the road to entrepreneurial hell’, for reasons of being nihilistic, narcissistic, utterly selfish and utterly short-term focused.

You know what the answer is, don't you?!

At this seems to be the moral of this story: 

• When companies only operate like trading houses and do not want to be responsible for anything else than the delivery of a certain service, product or project;
   
• And when the only party feeling responsible for their staff is the staff itself,

this leads to a detachment within companies and (in the end) within society that can be hardly repaired anymore. 

As long as the owners of such companies are seen as financial winners and not as moral losers, the deterioration of working circumstances and the detachment between staff and employers will continue.

While the chairman of the Dutch National Bank DNB pleads for a substantial raise in wages for the middle class and lower class workers, the employers remain focused on wage restraint.

A few weeks ago, there was a plea for higher wages from an unlikely, and therefore quite unsuspicious source:  chairman Klaas Knot of De Nederlandsche Bank (i.e. the Dutch  national bank).

While Knot’s political position is usually firmly based at the liberal-conservative side of the political spectrum, his plea for higher wages was heartfelt and ought to be taken serious, in my humble opinion.

Knot argued that the Dutch lower and middle class suffered from the circumstance that their average wages had been on a virtual stand-still since the start of the economic crisis in 2008, while their average expenses had soared since that date. This was due to the increase of taxes, (social) housing rent rates and general costs of living. The consequences for the general purchase power among these classes were predictable: it dropped!

This trend was confirmed through Mathijs Bouman’s column in Het Financieele Dagblad, about which I already reported yesterday:

In the meantime, the gross domestic product (GDP) [in The Netherlands – EL] has increased to levels slightly higher than before the crisis started. However, due to the population growth that took place in these eight crisis years, this is not true for the GDP per capita.

Consumer expenditure has been lagging since 2008. There was no 11% growth for private consumption in those eight years, but in fact a 2% decline between 2008Q1 and 2016Q1.

This had devastating consequences for many Small and Medium Enterprises in the Netherlands and especially for the retail industry: the ‘middle of the road’, store chains like V&D, C&A, Blokker, D&A and Hema, as well as the traditional, small 'mom & pop' stores, all went through rough times.

While this policy of wage restraint was more or less defensible during the tough first years of the crisis – roughly from 2009 until 2014 – it has not stopped since, in spite of the fact that the large employers already enjoy very good sales results and king sized profits.

Yesterday, I created a chart using the data from Statline, the online database of the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics. This chart was based upon the development of collective wages between 2008 and 2016, versus the indexed price level during the same time frame. The results were quite surprising for me:

The Harmonized Price Index, vs the
average collective labour income index
Chart by: Ernst's Economy for You
Data courtesy of: www.cbs.nl
Click to enlarge

During the timeframe from 2011 until roughly 2015, the rise of the harmonized price level exceeded the lackluster increases of the collective labour income, meaning that the general public in The Netherlands was in fact losing purchase power.

The surprising thing is, however, that – probably under influence of the dropping energy prices and the general deflatory forces within Europe, as well as the cautious rises of labour income since early 2016 – the harmonized price index and the labour income index are roughly at the same level now.

This does not mean at all that the purchase power has actually improved since 2008, but that it at least has not deteriorated since that year.

Nevertheless, the mindset of many people is still crisis-like and they will probably remain very cautious with spending their hard-earnt money, unless some dramatical happens with their purchase power. This is a message that Klaas Knot understands very well. Also to these eyes only a drastical improvement of the general purchase power for the middle and lower classes could solve this depression-like crisis, that has been lingering for more than seven years in a row.

Just like so many other countries in the world, The Netherlands has become a country of two speeds: the high velocity is represented by the large companies and multinationals, and also by the wealthiest people in the Dutch society. These parties all enjoyed massive profits and a dramatic rise of their income and they all have very good prospects in the next few years to come.

The lower and middle classes, including many small and medium enterprise companies and retail companies, represent the low velocity in Dutch society, as they still seem to suffer from the financial, as well as the psychological consequences of the crisis which does not seem to have ended yet.

Not only the income of many lower and middle class members has been on a virtual standstill since the start of the crisis; the certainty of receiving an monthly income at all has diminished dramatically too.

Especially countless youngsters do not have the luxury of getting a fixed contract against a decent salary, when applying for a job. Instead they are often forced to lead an uncertain life, while meandering from one temporary contract to another zero hour contract. Or they are only offered trainee jobs against a token salary, which they accept, hoping that they will be “promoted” to a fixed contract at the end of their traineeship.

This week it was in the news (BNR News Radio – in Dutch) that no less than 25% of all workers in The Netherland works on a flexible contract in 2016 and that 80% of these people (i.e. 1.3 million Dutch workers) is actually a ‘flexworker’ against his/her will.

And while jobless workers, slightly above fifty years of age, still have at least 15 years of working ahead in theory, there are unfortunately not so many companies who want to take the “risk” of hiring these older workers, for various reasons. A lot of these people will stay unemployed for a long time for exactly this reason.

On top of that there is also the growing army of (sometimes involuntary) freelance workers (i.e. ZZP’ers in Dutch), whose horizon of income certainty  lasts as long as their current contract does.

Therefore I was very pleased to hear this plea from particularly Klaas Knot –as chairman of the Dutch national bank an influential, non-political figure – hoping that both politics and large employers would see his statement as a serious signal for change in the remuneration of their employees, as well as in the way that large companies employ their workers. That change should be in favour of more fixed contracts and less freelance contracts, flexible employment and zero hour-contracts.

Unfortunately, the employers’ organizations have managed to misunderstand this important signal by Klaas Knot. Their argumentation was again akin to the fixed mantra that has been used over and over again since the economic crisis started:

Higher wages have a negative influence on the competitive power of The Netherlands, as it makes Dutch products and agricultural produce more expensive. This hampers the Dutch export capabilities and is therefore bad for employment. Such a dramatical wage increase should therefore not be demanded by the labour unions or by Klaas Knot, as a matter of fact!

The diminished purchase power of the Dutch middle classes is all the fault of the income and wage taxes and thus the fault of Dutch politics: not the fault of the large employers in The Netherlands.

It is the same ol’, same ol’ as always and the perfect argument to kill every discussion about higher wages and remuneration for the Dutch workers and middle class representatives.

The following snippets come from Het Financieele Dagblad:

The plea of DNB to stronger increase the wages is ‘nonsense’, according to managing director Cees Oudshoorn of employers’ organization VNO-NCW. “Higher wages are just a recipe for higher unemployment”, he warns. “There is no underpayment in The Netherlands”.

VNO-NCW rejects this conclusion of DNB. According to Oudshoorn it is not right that the real wages have lagged. “If you want to judge the pace of the wage development, you have to compare it with the development of labour productivity”, he states. “The development of those two figures is remarkably similar.

The corporate lobby recognizes the fact that the purchase power has lagged in The Netherlands, but blames this on the excess difference between the wage expenses for the employer and the net wages for the employee. “That this wedge has developed over time is devastating for purchase power”, according to Oudhoorn. “Tax redemption is the only way, but that is in the hands of politics”.

According to labour federation FNV it is about time that the wages are increased drastically. “Employers and large principals have now much more room to increase wages and hourly rates for professionals”, according to Gijs van Dijk, vice-chairman of FNV. “Especially the underpayment of “ZZP’ers” (i.e.  freelance professionals) must stop.

It is now much too easy for employers to profit from the fiscal benefits that ZZP’ers currently enjoy, while hiring them, instead of contracting workers on a fixed contract.

“The fiscal benefits [of ZZP’ers - EL] are now used by employers as leverage in order to force their hourly rates down and that is a violation of the purpose of their fiscal advantage”, according to Van Dijk. “Hence, this way it becomes a subsidy on wages and in fact state support”.

VNO-NCW actually resists against the equalization of freelancers and normal employers. “The increase of the number of freelance professionals makes sense, when we look at the high wage expenses and inflexible labour contracts”, according to Oudshoorn. “When they make the rules for hiring freelance professionals just as rigid, as in case of normal workers, the government only creates more unemployment.”

According to the labour unions, it is indefensible that especially large corporations enjoyed soaring profits, but that professionals hardly profited from this development. According to the investigation of DNB, the shareholders did see their yields increase strongly over the last decade. At the same time, the government decreased the taxes on corporate profits, while workers paid more and more taxes.

Cees Oudshoorn is actually right with his remarks about the Dutch labour productivity, as the following chart shows. In this chart the average labour income is compared with the labour productivity [unfortunately, CBS did not have more recent data than 2014 available, so I extrapolated that at the same level through 2016 – EL]. 

The labour productivity index, vs the
average collective labour income index
Chart by: Ernst's Economy for You
Data courtesy of: www.cbs.nl
Click to enlarge

The question is: who is to blame for that?!

Especially the drop in labour productivity in 2009 is caused by the fact, that employers wanted to keep their workers under contract, in spite of the mounting crisis in those days. When a company has lower production figures to meet with an equal amount of people, every worker has to produce lower numbers in average. This has definitely a negative influence on labrou productivity. 

In those days, the government partly subsidized these excess workers by creating the so-called “part-time unemployment benefit”. This is what I wrote about it in 2011:

Especially the [manufacturing industry – EL] will (in my opinion) suffer from the fact that the part-time unemployment benefit, which was established in 2009, prevented companies from reducing overcapacity in numbers of jobs and production facilities. As a consequence of this special government subsidy, companies kept people under contract that otherwise would have been dismissed. How noble that may seem initially, it makes companies less competitive. Especially now a new crisis is looming, due to the continuing problems in the Euro zone.

In the years afterwards, the labour productivity improved somewhat, but not dramatically. It is easy to blame the workers in The Netherlands for that “lackluster” performance, but it is defensible as well to look at the employers themselves.

As the wages for fixed and flexible workers were restrained or even reduced during the crisis years, as well as the remuneration for ZZP’ers (i.e. freelancers), there were fewer incentives for employers to improve their labour productivity.

The ample availability of inexpensive, go-getting flexworkers and freelancers from inside and outside the European Union made the need for improved labour productivity diminish. People were relatively cheap, so a company could hire a few more quite easily without paying a whole lot of money, instead of trying to improve their labour productivity.

I also do agree with Cees Oudshoorn that the wedge between gross and net salary for many workers is quite high in The Netherlands (in some cases too high). 

However, that is the unfortunate price that our country has to pay for the fact that a large number of citizens and large companies has become very cunning in avoiding taxes through the usage of fiscal constructs. When the need for tax money at central and local governments stays equal, but the number of tax payers diminishes, every tax payer and tax paying institution has to pay more tax money in any which way possible. The large employers know that all too well, just like Joe Sixpack does, as he feels it in his wallet.

Nevertheless, as long as the large corporations and the wealthy citizens, who live from their investments and dividends, refuse to pay more taxes on their annual income, the tax wedge for workers will remain substantial.

Personally, I think that the large employers and the government should lower their resistance against substantial wage increases for the lower and middle classes, as this would be very good for the Dutch economy as a whole. In that respect I fullheartedly agree with Klaas Knot and I fully endorse his message.

Instead the government and large companies should think about ways to increase their (labour) productivity and to lift their innovative powers, so that the competition on price with bulky export goods, agricultural produce and distribution could finally become a thing of the past.

I rather call The Netherlands “the land of innovation” than “the land of exports”!

Are Dutch consumers disbanding their own floriculturists, by settling for cheaper Kenyan produce alone?!

Globalization can hurt sometimes and it can seem very unfair indeed...

A few days ago I was buying flowers for my beloved wife Olga. She was having her birthday that day and we were also celebrating our 12th wedding anniversary AND mother’s day earlier that week. So, it was the right time to indulge her with a really beautiful bouquet of the best roses that money can buy!

One of the perks of living in my city Almere is that one can buy the freshest, most exclusive and most beautiful roses, ‘straight from the motherlode’; in other words, from the floriculturists who grow these flowers in their massive greenhouses at the edge of our city.

For many floriculturists, having a small flower shop within their greenhouse is a welcome way to earn a few extra bucks, as times for such floriculturists are still very hard indeed. 

In the early weeks of this year, I already wrote an article about the sad demise of floriculturist Termeulen Roses in Almere:

Yesterday I learned from my beloved wife Olga that Termeulen Roses in Almere Buiten and a few other horticultural companies in my city had defaulted during 2015. This was very sad news for me.

Especially Termeulen Roses was one of those companies that make a person proud of his city. The enormous greenhouses of this one-man business, vibrant of life and with sizes as large as football fields,  were filled to the brim with beautiful, growing roses in all colours of the rainbow. And visitors were welcomed with the delicate fragrances, spread by the different sorts of roses that Termeulen produced. This all made the greenhouse such an inspirational environment.

The roses and plants in the greenhouses were litterally humming from the insects that acted as natural fertilizers (bees and bumblebees) or as environmentally friendly parasite exterminators (a.o. lady bugs), while the greenhouses themselves – in spite of their enormous energy consumption especially during  night – acted as huge energy cells, returning loads of excess energy to the energy grid.

The entrance part of the greenhouse complex was a sheer jungle of stainless steel, as a complex of assembly lines, rail systems, gathering machines, bundling machines and packaging machines turned the freshly cut roses into wrapped rose bouquets within minutes. After being packaged, the roses were sent to the cold store, in order to wait for the beginning of their – sometimes long – journey to someone’s house or office, as the ultimate token of appreciation and love.

For me this company – and a few other horticultural companies in the same area as well – was the place to be when I wanted to buy the best and most beautiful roses for my wife and for other people, who deserved a special attention.

This week, I visited Stricker Rozen in Almere: a renowned grower of absolutely stunning roses and – together with the aforementioned Termeulen Roses who sadly defaulted in the beginning of this year – traditionally one of my skyhigh favorites for buying a nice bouquet, because of the impeccable quality and long-lasting beauty of their produce.

A stunning bouquet of roses, delivered by Stricker Rozen, Almere
Picture by: Ernst Labruyère
Click to enjoy!

Yet again, Stricker amazed me with a mindblowing new kind of roses that he developed and produced exclusively in his greenhouse: an exquisite flower that was based upon years of ennoblement and hard work.

I could not help asking Remco Stricker – the current owner of family business Stricker Rozen who had replaced his father Jan as main entrepreneur – how he managed to get their company through the crisis? This in the light of Termeulen’s default and that of some of his other competitors in Almere.

His answer surprised me slightly, as I expected him to complain about disappointing exports and the boycott of the EU against Russia and vice versa:

Stricker: “We have survived until now and we still manage to survive. Yet, times are very hard for us indeed. Of course, this boycott with Russia is a drag, but it is not our biggest problem. Actually, the exports of our flowers is the cork on which our company floats.

No, our biggest concern is the fact that the Dutch people themselves do not want to purchase Dutch flowers anymore. They settle for roses from Kenia, as these are much cheaper, because of the much, much lower labour expenses and the circumstance that labour regulations and other conditions are much looser than in The Netherlands.”

Ernst: “I thought it were only the supermarkets and large retailers of cheap flowers (i.e. mostly petrol stations), which bought the Kenian ‘stuff’ and not the specialized flower shops?!”

Stricker: “Oh no, everybody in The Netherlands is now settling for Kenyan roses! Supermarkets... Large retailers... But also the specialized flowershops. Our roses are now mainly produced for exports!”

This answer baffled me... 

Especially roses are a product built upon emotion. A product that people buy with their hearts and not only with their brains and wallets. A product of which the scent and the sheer beauty alone have to seduce people into buying.

Personally, I have very little to hold against Kenyan roses, but I thought that they were the kind of “mass-produced, slightly dull and somewhat ordinary stuff” that only cheapskates buy to indulge their wives, girlfriends or secretaries: not because they are very beautiful, but because they are 'good enough', cheap and amply available. Or the hurried customer, who does not have time to go to a specialized flower shop, but settles for a cheap, mass-produced bouquet from the gas station or the supermarket instead.

The sad truth is, however, that – probably without knowing / realizing it –virtually everybody buys Kenyan roses in The Netherlands. The Dutch produce is exported to “greener pastures”, where people DO want to spend serious money, in exchange for having the best quality of roses. The Dutch settle for less, obviously.

Yet, I do understand this.

Myself, I almost always go straight to these floriculturists nowadays to buy flowers, as they are residing in my home town at only a few kilometers from my home. On top of that, they sell the best and longest lasting flowers in the business. 

But also before I discovered these growers in Almere, I often settled for the convenience of supermarket and petrol station; especially for their extended opening hours in the evening and on Sundays. Consequently, I seldomly visit(ed) a specialized flowershop anymore, to be honest. When I did once, on Valentine’s day a few years ago, I was unpleasantly surprised by the substantial price per flower: a price to which I was not used anymore.

Besides that, especially this category of retailers is struck very hard by the enduring economic crisis, as flowers – and especially the more expensive ones from a specialized flowershop – are merely a luxury good that people skip easily, when they can’t miss the money for it.

One should realize that the current consumer expenditure in The Netherlands is still lying below(!) the level of consumer spending as measured in early 2008, months before the crisis started. This is what economist and journalist Mathijs Bouman stated in his weekly column about the Dutch economy in Het Financieele Dagblad:

In the meantime, the gross domestic product (GDP) [in The Netherlands – EL] has increased to levels slightly higher than before the crisis started. However, due to the population growth that took place in these eight crisis years, this is not true for the GDP per capita.

Consumer expenditure has been lagging since 2008. There was no 11% growth for private consumption in those eight years, but in fact a 2% decline between 2008Q1 and 2016Q1.

This is the sad truth for flower sales and flower cultivation in The Netherlands. 

Specialized flower shops are losing business, due to the fact that:

a. their customers settle for the convenience and lower sales prices of supermarkets and petrol stations with their inexpensive, Kenyan roses and

b. their private customers in general have much less money to spend on flowers in 2016 than they had in 2008. This is the consequence of an income that stayed almost equal during this whole timeframe, while the tax expenses are much higher now than eight years ago.

In order to compete with the large retailers and supermarkets, these flowershops themselves apparently have to settle for Kenyan roses nowadays, as these are still much more inexpensive than Dutch roses, in spite of the costs of air transport covering thousands of kilometers.

And so the Dutch involuntary help to disband their own floriculturists, by not buying their more expensive flowers, but settling for cheaper ones from abroad. 

The most beautiful roses in the world, in my not so humble opinion, are mostly sent to other people than the Dutch, who grow them but don’t see them bloom anymore.  This is the bitter taste of globalization going slightly awry.

Still, once you have looked at the sheer beauty and impeccable quality of Dutch roses, why would you settle for less?! I'm certain I will not do that anymore...

The new variety of roses by Stricker Rozen, Almere
Picture by: Ernst Labruyère
Click to enjoy!

And you go see for yourself by looking at this picture: did you ever see more beautiful flowers? Well, did you?!