Flowers insolita Blog

There’s an interesting article in Boston Globe entitled “Picking just the right florist.”

The author, Kytja Weir, tested two national brands, FTD.com and 1-800-flowers.com, as well as two local florists in Boston, Winston Flowers and University Florist.  I know Winston; they are a very famous florist over there.  Her budget was $75 including everything (tax and delivery).

She gave a good mark to one of the local florists, University Florist.  Kudos for them!

She didn’t like Winston, because the flowers didn’t last long and the arrangement size was too small.  Winston is “too famous” for small orders like a $75 bouquet.  My best guess for what happned is that their designers probably didn’t care.  Artists’ arrogance.  A common problem of a “famous” florist is that they are used to be doing a lot of artistic event work, in which the longivity of flowers doesn’t matter.

She didn’t like 1-800-flowers, because the flowers were essentially a whole bunch of cheap flowers, many of which didn’t last.  She got unlucky; this florist who delivered 1-800 order seems to be a particularly bad one.  But, here’s the fundamental problem of using 1-800-flowers: you have no control over which florist will make your arrangement.

She didn’t like FTD, either, not because of the flowers but because they forgot to include a message card.  Nah.  People do make mistakes, and this florist was decent enough to send an apology plant.  Not many do this.  I would give a high mark to this florist (Exotic Flowers).  But again, FTD doesn’t deserve the credit.  This local florist does.

In another post, I talked about a nursery guy who was claiming that it’s been difficult to find a “decent young people” willing to work in his establishment. I also wrote that I hear the same stories from many small business owners.

Well, one of our employees, who happens to be a young Long Island person, just disappeared. I say “disappear” because she didn’t tell us she was quiting. She just didn’t show up one day, and that was it. That day, she left a message in our answering machine, saying she had “forgotten” that she had to go to school that day, so she couldn’t come to work. Sounds stupid, we thought but we didn’t know she actually had quit. Interestingly, her mom showed up instead, to pick up her pay-check.

On her next workday (Friday), she didn’t show up again. At that point, we realized that she actually had quit and her message on Monday was a complete lie.

We are clueless as to why she quit. Regardless, there’s nothing wrong for anyone to quit the job. But, I would have expected her to tell us that s/he is quiting, preferably two weeks in advance. Not showing up one day, making up a story, and sending her mom to pick up the paycheck… that isn’t something I would have expected a grownup to do.

The bigger question, though, is how come her mom is allowing this behavior. Does she know that her daughter just lied to us? Or was she also being misled by her daughter. Maybe she told her mom a completely different story, along the line of her being a victim of a terrible work place or something.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter. We know the truth. In the meantime, we now have an opening for a sales rep position. Hopefully we can find someone responsible this time.

We are located in Long Island, the Island of Lindsay Lohan and spoiled brats.

I was talking to the owner of a nursery the other day.  He was complaining how difficult it is to find “decent young people” to work in his establishment.  I often hear the same story from many small retail-business owners here; young people in Long Island do not want to work in their stores. 

Come to think of it, in the last three years, we have hired about two dozen young local people (all of them are female); only two lasted more than three months.  One lasted only 3 hours, which is the current record of the shortest tenure of our past employees.

Take a look at any fast-food restaurants in Long Island.  Do we see any young Long Islanders working there?  I don’t think so.  Flipping burgers is not a kind of job that princes and princesses in Long Island would take.  Too much of a work for too little pay, just like a job in a flower shop or nursery for that matter.

I often go to a local supermarket (STOP & SHOP) to buy fresh fruits used for fruit baskets.  There are a couple of young people “working” there.  By “working”, I mean a) chatting with friends and b) text-messaging, while paying absolutely no attention to customers.

The other day, I was in the self-service checkout.  One of my items didn’t go through.  I dared to press “Help” button, which I shouldn’t have.  After several minutes, a young lady reluctantly showed up.  I explained the situation to her.  Annoyed by this unexpected extra work, she sighed to my face.  If one of our sales associates ever sighed to our customer asking for help, I guarantee you that she would be fired on the spot. I’m usually pretty quiet, not complaing about anything.  But I wasn’t having a good day on that particular day, so I told her, “But you are paid, right?”  To which she replied “You’re mean!”  The Princess spoke and I humbly accepted my defeat.

I sighed… I wonder if the manager of STOP & SHOP knows this.  Whoever the manager is, my guess is that s/he probably knows about it, but can’t do anything about it.  That’s because, if s/he complains, these kids would simply quit, creating a vacancy that s/he would have to fill again with, what, the same kind of kids.  There’s no realistic chance that the next one would be better.  Worse yet, their parents might sue the shop or manager for whatever reasons they come up with.  Not worth the fight. 

We are pleased to announce that we are now open on Sundays, from 1 pm to 5 pm.  We can deliver on Sundays, too.  So see you all on Sundays!

Recently, we have had a few incidents in which a prospective bride came into our store with a specific floral proposal that we believe had been articulated by some other florist.  She apparently was looking for a “cheaper” florist who could duplicate someone else’s idea at a discount.

We are sorry, but we don’t do that here.  We didn’t know who the other florist was, but we know that they must have spent time and money to provide that proposal.  Even though we are technically competitors, it is against our business ethics to steal someone else’s idea and make money out of it.

There is nothing wrong for a prospective bride to do price shopping.  In fact she should interview multiple florists, as each florist has a different design style and philosophy.  She should pick one whom she feels most comfortable with.

It’s just that a floral proposal is the real work done by a floral designer, even though it might be free.  As a fellow florist, we just can’t profit from the work done by someone else.

This is the side of order gathering that most people (except other florists ) will not hear about. It is really frustrating when we get these orders. This is just one example.

This morning I received a call from one of the wire services. They wanted to know if we could complete and deliver an order for Friday for them. My first question is always is there a picture of the arrangement on the web or do you have a style number ( ftd or teleflora). Next is the price including the delivery charge. Well, at first the young man said there wasn’t a picture but began to tell that there were pink and white lilies and 4 red roses and some other stuff in it and it was in this roundish shaped vase.  That doesn’t tell me a whole lot. If you expect the flowers in an arrangement to be like the ones that you have ordered… some other stuff  doesn’t help me deliver what you have ordered. He finally tells me that there is a picture of this arrangement on their website. So, I look it up. While I’m looking this up he tells me that it also needs a mylar balloon and three latex. He says he has $66.00 total, this amount is for the delivery charge, the arrangement and the balloons. I finally find the picture of this vase. It has at 5 stems of pink oriental lilies, 5 red roses, 8 stems of alstroemeria and is filled with wax flower. I told him we could do something similar but it would not be as full as this. Oh, I forgot the best part of this. This company is running a special on this arrangement. Original price is 64.99 NOW 54.99. They do not make the arrangements!!! They do not buy the flowers that go into the arrangements. They do not need to worry about cost or size or delivering the arrangement or making the customer happy. Once you have placed your order …. they have made their money. Out of that $66.00 the delivery charge comes out first. The order was going to an area that we charge 10.00 for because it is

According to an article that appeared in British tabloid “The Sun” yesterday, a romantic proposal plan by a British guy vanished into thin air, after a balloon containing an expensive diamond ring was blown away.

The guy, Lefkos Hajji, asked his florist to put his $12,000 engagement-ring inside a balloon. His plan was to give her girlfriend a pin to “pop” the ring out. Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. After he left the florist shop, a gust pulled his balloon from his hand…

Lefkos said: “I couldn’t believe it… I just watched as it went further and further into the air. I felt like such a plonker. It cost a fortune and I knew my girlfriend would kill me.”

According to him, his girlfriend isn’t talking to him ever since.

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I was wondering, though, what if this happened to us, or any florist in America for that matter? I think there’s a good chance that we would end up in a court. Are we supposed to refuse a potentially risky request from a customer?  What if he insists?  Do we have to ask the customer to sign a paper saying that we aren’t responsible for the consequence?  Food for thoughts…

According to BBC News, an Iranian court ordered a guy to give his wife the 124,000 roses that he promised in her dowry.

(Excerpt from the BBC site)

The woman said she was claiming the dowry because her “very stingy husband” would not even pay for a cup of coffee, according to the E’temad newspaper.

The court has seized the man’s flat until he produces all of the roses.

Under Iranian law, a woman can claim her dowry, or mahr, at any time during a marriage or when getting divorced. [snip]

According to E’temad, the woman, identified as Hengameh, decided to claim her entire dowry of 124,000 red roses after 10 years of marriage to “punish her very stingy husband”.

“Shortly after marriage, I realised that Shahin was very cheap,” she told the newspaper. “He even refused to pay for my coffee if we went to a cafe or restaurant.”

Shahin told the court he could only afford to give her five roses a day and complained that it was his wife’s “billionaire friends who had put such ideas in her head”.

But the judge rejected Shahin’s pleas and ordered his $64,000 (£33,000) flat to be confiscated until he has bought them all.

A long-stemmed rose costs about $2 (£1.09) in the Iranian capital, Tehran.

It is common in Iran to offer gold coins or property as mahr. An Iranian man can end up in jail for dowry debts.

124,000 roses!!! With the pace of 5 roses a day (~1,825 roses a year), it takes about 68 years to pay off this debt. Good luck Mr Shahin!

If you’ve ever read our article on “Internet florist”, you already know that these guys are not florists. They just take your order and electronically transmit the order to a local florist for fulfillment and delivery. We real florists call them “Order Gatherers” or simply OG.

Some of them are called dOG, meaning deceptive OG. They usually masquerade as a local florist in a town that you are trying to send flowers to. Our town, Huntington, has many of those dOGs lurking in the search results of Google/Yahoo/Yellow Pages, some of whom are enshrined in our “Hall of Shame” list. We don’t fill for them. We do fill for other OGs (called hOGs or honest OGs), like FTD.com, FromYouFlowers.com (ProFlowers), etc. In many cases, however, distinction between hOG and dOG is not very clear.

The other day, our manager (Lori) got a call from one of those OGs. He had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. He wanted us to make “a flower arrangement.” - “… well, OK, what kind of flower arrangement do you want us to make”, she asked. He said, “um… I dunno… there’s some purple thing in it.” “Purple thing?” “yeah… looks like purple to me.”
What are we supposed to do when an OG want us to deliver “a flower arrangement” with what looks like “some purple thing in it”? Obviously, we declined the order.

There are three kinds of lilies available as cut flowers. They are (1) Asiatic lilies, (2) LA-Hybrid lilies, and (3) Oriental lilies. All of them are hybrids of many different species.

(1) Asiatic lilies are colorful, but the smallest (therefore least expensive) among the three. The bloom size rarely exceeds 4″ and the flowers are non-fragrant. Most cut lilies sold by mass-marketers are Asiatic lilies. Expect the vase life of 5-7 days. We don’t carry Asiatic lilies; we use LA-Hybrids instead (see below).

(2) LA-hybrid lilies are the hybrids of Longiflorum (trumpet) and Asiatic lilies. They are as colorful as Asiatic, but significantly bigger and stronger than Asiatic lilies. The bloom size is 4-6″; the flowers are typically non-fragrant. Expect the vase life of 7-10 days. In our opinion, for colored lilies, LA-hybrids are much better values than Asiatic lilies.

(3) Oriental lilies are the biggest of the three and typically most expensive. They are available in a few colors: white, pink, and pale yellow, and, occasionally, dark purple (called “Sumatra“). The bloom is as big as 6-8″; the flowers can be intensely fragrant. Unfortunately, some people are allergic to the smell. Expect the vase life of 10-14 days.

Buying tips

1) Don’t count the number of stems; count the number of buds. Don’t be fooled by cheap stem-price. Cheap lilies probably carries only 2-3 buds per stem, whereas reasonably priced lilies should carry at least 3-4 buds per stem (4-6 buds are better). Some of the premium-grade Oriental lilies carry as many as 6-8 buds per stem.

2) Look for a thick, sturdy stem. Lilies are top-heavy. Unless the stem is strong, when you arrange them in a vase, they might droop. Also, weak, soft stems often indicate a prolonged storage and/or temperature fluctuation during transport.

3) Look for healthy leaves. If the leaves look yellowish, they probably sustained ethylene damage. Do not buy them.