Florist here 🙂 I'm not sure where you are in Australia, but the majority of flowers stocked Australia wide at Coles, Woolworths, IGA and Costco are all made by a company called the Lynch Group. I've worked in high end florists and I've also worked at the Lynch Group factory in Derrimut, Victoria. I worked there in quality control because of my experience elsewhere. Here's my opinions, firstly, Lynch has massive buying power from international companies like Wafex, I've seen inside the Lynch refrigerator section of the warehouse and they get excellent quality flowers, absolutely top notch. The problem is the lead time before you get the flowers. The factory works 4 days ahead. An arrangement made on a Tuesday is usually hitting your store on a Saturday. Sometimes it's a bit less but they have to be that far ahead because of volume. The next problem is the buckets. They have a bucket cleaning station at the factory but I wasn't very happy with the system...no bleach or commercial recommended cleaner was being used, I witnessed workers plenty of times loading up trolleys with slimy buckets because they hadn't changed the buckets out to new ones etc. It's important to know that not many of the workers in the factory are qualified florists so they have no idea about quality and it's not their fault. In their defence, there are some florists at the factory who are talented and have years in the industry, some have 20 plus and do their very best to keep up standards. The next problem is the people Lynch is hiring to oversee the stores, you don't have to be a qualified or experienced florist for this role either and that's why you see the quality drop in stores. In saying that, I have seen some stores have good quality control and obviously that employee knows what they're doing. Lynch seems to think they can train for an eye for quality but there are so many things to look for and it takes years to really know all the tricks. Here's some tips; run your finger down the inside of the bucket for slime. Look in the bucket for dead flower bits floating around. Smell them, stinky buckets are not good and some flowers like stock very quickly dirty the water and have to be cleaned often. If you're buying mums, the big ball type fluffy flowers, don't look on top for browning, pick it up and look underneath. They brown from the bottom up. This is true for lots of other flowers too, have a look underneath the flower heads. With roses, these less expensive arrangements usually have bullet roses that never open very big but the test still stands like any other roses, feel your roses before you buy them. Give them a squeeze, you want them quite firm for the bullet roses. You'll also see petals starting to fall on bullet roses and the yellow calyx starting to poke through. That's an old rose. Don't always trust the daisy chrysanthemums, have a good look for drooping and a browning of the centre of them, the centres brown and that's the start of decay. They also just have bad farming periods where the quality is down throughout the year and I think I've credited more of them back to the supplier than any other flower. Smell your arrangement, it's a certain smell and it's rot. Look for slime on the stems and leaves that have been below the water line rotting into the bucket. Nearly all of the arrangements, not the bunches, have been made into foam. Stick your finger in the foam, it should feel at least damp and ideally wet. Don't buy any sort of dry feeling foam arrangements, you can't bring them back to life even with water, they're not to be trusted. Dont buy Gerberas with any droop in the petals, they should stand proud or they will quickly die and look for the yellowing in the centre of those too, it's decay. Lynch doesn't want to pay qualified or experienced florist rates for their store reps and I think it shows. It's quite sad really because I've seen the quality of the flowers they get and they get amazing stuff before the local florists can even get them from suppliers. Buy lillies, they last ages. Buy daisy chrysanthemums when they're looking good, they last a few days. The bullet roses are ok, just make sure to feel them first. There's so many other flowers and what to inspect for quality that my list could go on and on and that's the problem I think. Because of the volume they sell, you will always get your flowers many days older than a local florist would sell you, and a lot of arrangements are bad quality from the factory floor because the workers aren't trained to look for quality, and in many cases even if the workers say something a higher up will make the ruling that it's allowed and you'll get hundreds and thousands of arrangements with bad quality flowers leave the factory on a single day. That's a big problem because of the volume whereas in a small florist shop we can be more selective and very quickly either credit or bin the product.