QUESTION BOX. 93 



above all, the long, bright, sunshiny days which give our flowers the 

 rich color and make them the envy of less fortunate growers. Aside 

 from this, we are centrally located and have the very best of express 

 facilities for making quick shipments in all directions, making it pos- 

 sible to fill orders for flowers that are to be shipped a thousand or more 

 miles, with but an hour's notice. 



When I look back fifteen years and think what the business was then 

 and what it has grown to be, and think of the future before us, I feel 

 something like the early settler must have felt when he first viewed 

 our vast acres of rich, rolling prairie land everywhere ready for the 

 tilling. So it is with us engaged in the production of flowers. We have 

 a market everywhere ready to be taken; all it needs is the tilling. 



Our business differs from any other lines of business. Cut flowers 

 can not be kept indefinitely, like fruit. Ordinarily, when a shipment of 

 fruit is made, and should it be delayed for some few hours, it would 

 not affect the value of the fruit. Not so with flowers; they are more 

 often ordered for an especial occasion than otherwise and must leave 

 at a given time and arrive promptly or their usefulness would be past, 

 and so the wholesaler must be prepared, at all times, to fill rush orders 

 and when the time is very limited, to influence messengers to take ship- 

 ments without waybills. In fact, do many other things to get shipments 

 over the road in a hurry. To those of us engaged In this part of the 

 trade, find this, during our busy season, not an exception but an every- 

 day occurence. The producer of cut flowers knows at certain times 

 that there are not enough flowers to flU all the demands. Not so with 

 many of the smaller retailers who buy what they sell and do not under- 

 stand why they can not have all the stock they may want. 



During these periods come the strenuous days for the wholesaler; 

 days when it is necessary to figure every blossom that no one may be 

 disappointed, for to disappoint a good customer when you have booked 

 his order, and who, in many cases has sold the flowers long before he 

 has seen them, would do more to injure the business than anything I 

 know of. It is by the careful booking and filling of orders promptly, 

 with good stock, that our business will increase to acres of glass where 

 we now have but small houses. 



Chairman: The next thing on our program is the Question Box. 



QUESTION BOX. 



Mr. Green: While I haven't any question to ask, there is one thing, 

 in regard to inducing express messengers to accept flowers without a 

 way-bill. As all florists know, sometimes in making a rush order you 

 have not time to get the package billed out. At Fremont they used 

 to refuse to take them unless they were billed, and they being com- 

 mon carriers we thought it was our right to send the package anyway. 

 It was a matter of form with them to have the way-bill, and we felt 



