By Zach Solon | May 7, 2021 at 9:33 PM EDT – Updated May 7 at 11:45 PM
WILMINGTON, N.C. (WECT) – Mother’s Day is an always-popular day for florists. But with the pandemic still ongoing, flower shops in Wilmington are seeing high demand coupled with supply chain struggles.
“We have been blessed because demand overall during COVID has been strong because people can’t be together, they want to send flowers and that’s our specialty, so we have stayed busy all the way through,” said Jeff Cook, owner of Julia’s Florist in Wilmington.
Even though southeastern North Carolina has seen a dry spring, Cook says he and his staff have plenty of flowers, the significant issues come from truck shortages and driver shortages.
“The rain here does not affect quite as much as supply chain issues in Florida, overseas, even like flights out of Columbia, there’s a lot of roses grown in Columbia,” said Cook.
Just two days before Mother’s Day, Julia’s is still seeing hundreds of orders. They are already booked on deliveries until the Tuesday after the holiday. The staff, however, is working hard to meet the high demand.
“We’ve been in business in Wilmington for a long time so we’ve got a large base of customers,” said Cook. “But physically, there’s only so many orders that we can deliver. We have four vans, we rent six or seven more and we have drivers, but physically there’s just so many deliveries that we can make.”
Aside from the deliveries, the shop expects the weekend to be busy as orders are prepared and picked up in-store.
“It’s a combination of all these issues that come together and make it more difficult,” said Cook. “But we’re managing and having people come by and pick up flowers, we’ve got our deliveries all booked but we are still making arrangements.”
Not only are they arranging flowers, but they are making different arrangements and adjustments that many have had to get used to during the pandemic.
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