Normally, when I’m filming somewhere like this,
I try and set the camera so it's got that kind-of
professional, depth-of-field...
you know the shot, everything in the background is blurred.
But there's a windmill back there,
and I really want that in focus.
I had to throw out nearly all my script for this video.
Normally, when I go and film somewhere,
I try and write everything in advance.
I research things in detail before I get there,
when I arrive somewhere there should be no surprises.
But I knew, even as I set up for filming
on the roof of Royal FloraHolland,
that perhaps this video wasn't going to go to plan.
Good morning, it's just after sunrise here in Aalsmeer, in the Netherlands.
This is one of the largest commercial buildings in the world,
and today, just like every weekday,
millions of fresh flowers are being bought and sold inside. Sort of.
This market has existed is some form for a hundred years,
and recently there have been some changes.
Because here's how the story's supposed to go:
the auction room will be full of buyers,
frantically pushing buttons to bid as cart after cart after cart after cart after cart
of fresh flowers are paraded in front of them
in a massive, perfectly-timed logistics operation.
But I’m not sure that happens any more.
All the English-language sources I found are out of date,
because things are changing at the Dutch flower market.
It turns out a lot of the Dutch-language sources are out of date too.
The truth is that a famous decades-old tradition has ended,
in the same way that video-rental stores gave way to streaming.
A thing that tourists came to see,
and that a lot of people think still happens… is no more.
So I’m going to update the English-speaking world:
the famous Dutch Flower Auction Clock is no more.
But the flower market that it was once part of is still there,
and it runs on an almost incomprehensible scale.
IN DUTCH:
Efficiency. We’ll come back to that shortly.
I often complain that the camera doesn’t capture the scale of something that I visit,
but in this case, it’s not just the camera:
it’s that there are no good sightlines anywhere in that warehouse.
It’s next to the airport, so I can’t get drone shots.
And it’s not that tall, so there’s no one point
where you can overlook the whole thing.
Look, it’s so big that the employees sometimes use bikes inside
to get from one end to the other.
It’s a giant, high-speed, hyper-optimised clearing-house:
growers deliver flowers in the early morning,
and by lunchtime they’re sold and on their way to buyers,
either via the warehouses next door or in trucks that ship them onwards.
So okay, it’s a logistics warehouse.
The scale is impressive but it’s nothing too special.
The famous part is how the flowers are sold there.
If you’ve heard of a Dutch auction? This is one of those auctions,
I think the biggest one anywhere.
There’s lots of historical footage of the big auction clock,
it used to be analog and then went digital.
Hundreds of flower buyers all sat in theatre seating
as racks of flowers are paraded in front of them.
For each lot of flowers, the clock counts from a high price to a low price.
First to press their button stops the clock
and pays whatever it’s showing.
Press too late, someone else gets the flowers.
Press too early, you’ve paid too much.
It's an amazing system, it looks great on camera,
it’s been covered by loads of media over the years. And… it’s gone.
I thought the pandemic would have caused some changes, but…
no, it turns out this all changed years ago.
The internet enabled remote buying,
so the theatre seating got emptier and emptier over the years.
There’s now a reputation system for the sellers,
so buyers could know the quality was as advertised
without actually inspecting the flowers in person.
By the mid-2010s, those racks of flowers weren’t being pushed through the auction rooms,
and by the end of the decade, the rooms were closed down.
I got shown one of them, it looked abandoned and actually a little bit sad.
The replacement is many auctioneers running many clocks, over the internet,
all at the same time, sitting in cubicles with microphones.
The flower auction isn’t like some old railway
that gets kept alive as a tourist attraction,
or preserved by a group of volunteers running what's basically a reenactment society.
It turns over billions of euros every year,
and if tradition gets in the way of that, then tradition has to go.
And I think the sources aren’t up to date because
“this famous thing has slowly been replaced”
isn’t a nice friendly story. And besides that:
60% of what goes that warehouse
is sold in advance by contract now, bypassing the clocks entirely.
Some of the really large buyers, like international supermarket chains,
are making private arrangements with sellers who don’t use the warehouse,
because those chains are big enough
that they can handle the logistics themselves and that saves money.
The tourists do still visit. The scale there is still impressive,
and I think it’s still worth going to see
if you’ve got some spare time near Amsterdam.
But if you were hoping to watch the famous Dutch Auction Clock,
well, these days it’s a lesson to anyone who thinks that
they won’t need to change with the times.
In the business world, tradition is rarely more important than money.
And speaking of money, today’s video is sponsored by NordVPN.
Seriously, it actually is! I’m a little bit surprised too.
I'm on the road a lot at the moment, #and it turns out that having a magic button
that tells web sites and phone apps that I'm in my home country
is really useful. Without a VPN,
lots of sites that I’m visiting keep putting everything in Dutch
and giving me prices in Euros.
Sometimes there's not even an option to change that.
Even YouTube's sometimes like, "oh, ik zal je nooit opgeven”.
Last week, I was blocked from accessing a UK government site
until I turned on the VPN.
And also, when I'm researching, sometimes I find American sites
that completely block me because I'm in Europe and
they can't be bothered to comply with European privacy laws.
But now, I can click a button and tell those sites
"nope, I'm in any one of sixty countries now, let me in"
and it's actually, properly useful to me.
If you want streaming services to show you content from other countries,
that's an option too, just check the service’s terms and conditions first.
If you go to nordvpn.com/tomscott,
you'll find the best deal that they're currently offering,
and there's a 30-day money back guarantee.
So if it’s not right for you, nothing lost.
I am kinda surprised to be endorsing NordVPN this enthusiastically,
and saying "it works for me and I find it useful",
but: it is and I do.
So I’m okay with taking their money and breaking with tradition.
That's nordvpn.com/tomscott.