Its basically a huge warehouse full of little pallets of flowers (and other stuff too, we saw some stuffed animals and some fluffy donut things which you can poke flowers into). The people working in the warehouse have these little forklift things and they buzz around on them so fast! It looks like absolute chaos, but they never seem to hit each other.
There's also a monorail-type transporter for the flowers (they get a ride!). The pallets are picked up by this machine and flown through the air for hundreds of metres. The flower auction grounds are the size of several football fields.
Here's the flowers moving around the warehouse:
Here's the auction room - only registered wholesale buyers can purchase, not any old Joe like you and me! There are also online and telephone buyers in other countries who are also participating in the auctions. The two big screens are each an auction, and the goods are paraded past the bottom of the screen as they're being sold. The auctions are a Dutch clock auction, with a wheel starts high and then goes around while the price gets lower - when it gets to the price you're willing to pay, you hit your buzzer. Then you've won the auction.
Here's a bunch of buyers sitting there - looks like a lecture theatre to me! Tourists come and go through here all the time, so it was surprising that they seemed rattled by us staring at them!
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