We study a setting of online auctions with expiring/perishable items: $K$ items are sold sequentially, buyers arrive over time and have unit-demand. The goal is to maximize the social welfare (sum of winners' values). Most previously suggested mechanisms for this model are direct-revelation. In contrast, in real-life we usually see open mechanisms, most often a sequence of English auctions. We ask whether the previous optimal approximation bounds can be achieved using the more popular/realistic mechanism, or a small variant of it. We observe that a sequence of English auctions (the exact original format) does not guarantee any constant approximation, and describe two variants that bring back the approximation guarantee.