Nothing so well captures the Dutch skill at supply-chain management as a million square meters of flowers:
.
The Dutch manage a good part of the western world’s day-to-day consumption of flowers from three major facilities in The Netherlands and through logistical connections to other petal-producing centres, like Kenya and Ecuador.
The largest market is not far from Schiphol Airport (Aalsmere, above), but air is not the way that most of the flowers come in. Trucks handle the transfer from the nurseries to retail markets around Northern Europe.
.
So impressive are the logistics that the Flower Market has become a tourist attraction all on its own – a place where the ballet of market capitalism is literally performed.
.
In between production and consumption, there is the Flower Market auction – the place where the price is determined, the supply coordinated with the demand, and the transfer arranged.
Some of it is for show, maintained by tradition. (This, after all, is the home of the ‘Dutch auction’ – where the price starts high and declines until a bid is placed.) But the bidders in their serried ranks don’t really need to be there. And many aren’t. Like stock exchanges everywhere, electronic exchanges are replacing them.
.
As these communal places disappear, there will no doubt be nostalgia, but not a lot of regret. The Dutch still intend to be overseeing the exchange of flowers no matter where or how it happens. Or more particularly, they will be centralizing the information even as technology allows for the decentralization of physical facilities. All the better to apply specialized knowledge (developed here) to smooth the processes, make them more efficient, and the Dutch more money. In that tradition, even the world’s largest Internet Exchange is in Amsterdam (as measured by average throughput).
Back to trucking – another ‘place’ where there’s more potential to apply logistical skills: to capture the wasted space in all those mobile containers, shortening up the time and travel it takes for goods to move. It’s the cultural shift that’s the challenge: convincing competitors to share information to achieve a better result for all – but maybe not as much as market domination would.
All the more reason, then, to wonder why the Dutch, who can achieve amazing things among competitors around the world (they’ve made Kenyan rose growers members of their co-op), don’t apply the same rationale at home on their roads, where clearly supply and demand are not balanced or priced in the same rational way as the stuff that the trucks which clog up the roads carry inside.
As well, there’s a question no doubt discussed but to which I was not party: how to deal with the social implications of displacement as logistics becomes ever more automated. Even those who climb the educational ladder may find their jobs off-shored or simply disappeared.
Well, no matter how good or bleak the news, there’s always a market for flowers, to celebrate in good times and to serve as an affordable consolation in bad. The Dutch count on that.
.
