The city’s florists — for whom May is a make-or-break month — face a two-front squeeze: empty streets as customers cross into Shenzhen for the weekend, and a flood of cross-border flower deliveries undercutting them on price.
On a typical Saturday in May, the narrow stretch of Flower Market Road in Mong Kok is among the most fragrant places in Asia. Vendors stack carnations and peonies in towering buckets along the pavement, the scent of lilies mingles with the diesel of passing trucks, and shoppers clutch bouquets as they jostle through the crowd. For Hong Kong’s florists, the weekend before Mother’s Day — the industry’s single biggest trading moment of the year, rivalling Valentine’s Day in sales volume — is their Super Bowl.
This year, however, many in the trade are heading into the occasion with a growing sense of unease. The streets that should be full of their customers are emptying out, and not just because the carnations are being bought elsewhere. Increasingly, the customers themselves are simply not in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong residents took, on average, over 6 million trips per month to Shenzhen in 2024, up from around 4 million trips per month in 2023, with many popular crossing points — such as at Futian and Luohu — frequently setting new records for daily trips processed. The phenomenon has a name in Cantonese — heung bak, or “heading north” — and it has reshaped how and where Hong Kongers spend their leisure time and their money. What was once a trickle of bargain hunters making the short hop across the border for a cheap hotpot dinner has become a mass migration that empties the city on long weekends and public holidays.
Hong Kong, one of the world’s most crowded cities, was eerily quiet over the four-day Easter holiday this past April. Local news headlines during the weekend were all about Hong Kongers “heading north,” with massive crowds and traffic jams reported at border control points such as Lo Wu and Shenzhen Bay Port and cross-border bridges. Lam Chi-chung, the General Secretary of the Hong Kong Department Stores & Commercial Staff General Union, described the situation as “busy crowds but poor profits,” anticipating an overall decline in retail business of approximately 10% due to changing spending habits.
Mother’s Day, which falls on Sunday, 10 May this year, presents a particularly acute version of this problem for the floral trade. Unlike a public holiday that creates a four-day window, it is a single Sunday — a day when families might ordinarily gather at home and present flowers to mothers and grandmothers. But increasingly, those families are spending the Sunday across the border, or are returning Saturday night too exhausted to stop at a flower stall. And for those who do want to send flowers, the market has a new and disruptive answer: mainland China can bring the bouquet to them.
A Squeeze from Both Sides
The competitive pressure on Hong Kong’s florists is, in fact, a two-front problem that has been building for several years, and Mother’s Day 2026 looks set to crystallise both pressures at once.
The first is footfall. Increased outbound travel by residents heading to Shenzhen has led to weak consumption in Hong Kong, with changes in spending patterns and reduced demand accelerating local retail’s downward trend, according to PwC. Florists, who depend more than most retailers on impulsive, in-person purchases — a husband who spots a bunch of peonies on the way home and thinks of his mother — are particularly exposed to a simple absence of people on the street.
The second pressure is pricing. Vendors at the Mong Kok Flower Market have expressed worries about increased competition from florists offering delivery from mainland China, with low-cost options advertised heavily on social media making them a popular choice for Hongkongers. One worker at Wen Chak Florist, who gave only her first name, Jessie, was candid about the difficulty. “There are so many advertisements on social media promoting flower transport across the border at very low prices,” she said. “We have no way to compete with them on price. I hope the government could take measures to respond.”
The cross-border flower delivery ecosystem she describes has grown remarkably sophisticated. Platforms like Taobao, JD.com, and WeChat mini-programs feature Shenzhen-based florists who deliver to Hong Kong, with some specialising entirely in cross-border deliveries and advertising specifically using the phrase “跨境送花” — cross-border flower delivery. During peak seasons such as Mother’s Day, buyers are encouraged to order three to seven days in advance to factor in potential holiday delays, with payment handled predominantly through digital wallets like WeChat Pay or Alipay.
The price differential is stark. A bouquet that costs upwards of HKD 800 to HKD 1,200 from a local Hong Kong florist can be sourced at a fraction of the price from Shenzhen. That gap, which holds across most floral categories including carnations and roses, is the central economic reality that local florists simply cannot compete with on cost alone.
Even human courier services — individuals who physically carry flowers across the border checkpoint on their daily commute — have emerged to serve the demand. These runners offer to source flowers from Shenzhen florists and hand-deliver them to Hong Kong addresses, with the entire order manageable simply by sending a screenshot from an app like Taobao or Meituan. It is, in effect, an informal logistics network that has grown up in the space between two cities whose borders have become more porous than ever before.
The Economics of Going North
Understanding why so many Hong Kongers are spending their weekends across the border — and therefore why they might take their Mother’s Day flowers with them, or source them from Shenzhen — requires a grasp of how dramatically the cost-of-living gap between the two cities has widened in recent years.
Numbeo estimates that Shenzhen has an overall cost of living about 50 percent lower than Hong Kong, which includes substantially lower restaurant and grocery prices. Dining in a hotpot restaurant in Shenzhen costs around HK$100 per person — a third of what a comparable meal costs in Hong Kong. The savings extend across virtually every discretionary category, from haircuts and spa treatments to clothing and entertainment. For a family of three or four, a weekend trip to Shenzhen can represent a genuinely significant financial saving compared to doing the same things at home.
Hong Kong residents are spending an increasing share of their income across the border on everything from medical services to groceries and prescription glasses. Travel is also far easier than it was even five years ago. By high-speed train, the first stop over the border is just 15 minutes away, and while the journey requires going through immigration, the process is usually speedy outside of major holidays.
The scale of spending is staggering. Hongkongers spent an estimated HK$66.5 billion in Shenzhen and its neighbouring cities in 2023 alone, according to investment bank Natixis. In the first five months of last year, Hong Kong residents’ non-cash spending in Shenzhen rose by 30 percent year-on-year, with shopping and dining accounting for 70 percent of their overall consumption.
What is particularly painful for Hong Kong’s retail sector is the asymmetry of the flow. The number of mainland visitors to Hong Kong dropped by 49 percent between 2018 and 2023, while overall tourist spending plunged by 46 percent. The shoppers who used to come south and spend freely are no longer arriving in the same numbers — and even those who do come tend to spend less. While same-day tourist arrivals increased 16 percent year-on-year in the second quarter of last year, this failed to translate into meaningful sales growth, according to a Savills report.
What Mother’s Day Looks Like Now
For the Hong Kong floral industry, the structural challenge has a specific shape on Mother’s Day weekend. Traditionally, florists would expect a sharp and predictable spike in demand across the preceding days and on the Sunday itself. Families would buy flowers on Saturday for mothers they planned to visit the following day, or swing by the Mong Kok Flower Market on Sunday morning before a dim sum brunch. The occasion, by its nature, rewards the kind of physical retail experience that Hong Kong’s dense, accessible market offers: proximity, abundance, and an emotional immediacy.
The northbound trend disrupts each of these assumptions. Families spending Mother’s Day in Shenzhen — dining at a fraction of the Hong Kong cost, staying in a hotel with access to amusement parks or spas — may mark the occasion with a gesture bought locally on the mainland, or arrive back in Hong Kong late Sunday evening after the flower market has closed. Those at home and wanting to order online face a digital marketplace in which Shenzhen-sourced arrangements are advertised relentlessly and cheaply.
Mother’s Day is described by luxury florists in Hong Kong as one of the busiest days of the year, rivalling Valentine’s Day in sales volume, and typically requiring customers to plan one to two weeks ahead for the best selection and guaranteed delivery slots. That lead time, however, is precisely the window in which cross-border competitors can capture orders from customers browsing their smartphones.
Over 300 retail shops shuttered in the first half of last year, 70 percent of which were food and beverage outlets, with sustained outbound spending by Hong Kong residents remaining a key negative factor, according to Savills. Florists occupy the same economic terrain.
Adaptation, Not Surrender
Not everyone in the trade is simply waiting for the numbers to fall. Some florists have leaned into the things that mainland competitors cannot yet easily replicate: personalisation, creative design, premium sourcing, and the tactile, social experience of buying flowers in person. The Mong Kok Flower Market’s more than 120 ground-floor shops spanning multiple streets continue to draw both local customers and visitors, maintaining a seven-day-a-week schedule throughout the year.
Others have invested in their digital presence, making it easier for customers to order ahead online, book same-day delivery, and tailor arrangements to specific tastes — competing not on raw price but on service, craft, and reliability. Pink carnations remain the classic Mother’s Day flower in Hong Kong, symbolising a mother’s enduring love, while phalaenopsis orchids and peonies are favoured for their elegance — attributes that experienced local florists have the expertise to curate in ways that mass cross-border logistics cannot always match.
What is clear is that the broader pattern — Hong Kong residents spending their leisure time, their dining bills, their gift budgets and their weekends across the border — is not about to reverse. Hong Kongers began heading to the mainland en masse in early 2023, after the border reopening following the end of Covid-19 restrictions, and today many do so as a matter of routine, drawn by a megacity that offers sprawling malls, a vibrant food scene, and cultural attractions at prices that Hong Kong simply cannot match.
For the florists of Mong Kok and beyond, Mother’s Day 2026 may yet bring a busy Sunday morning rush — sentiment for one’s mother, after all, is a strong commercial force. But the trajectory is one that no amount of fresh carnations can easily reverse. The city that was once the destination is increasingly becoming the departure point, and the flowers its residents give to mark life’s occasions are following them, petal by petal, across the border.
Mother’s Day falls on Sunday, 10 May 2026.
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