Getting what you've paid for....

On the heels of another holiday, I realize that once again customers are deceived at the photos from wire services, i.e. Teleflora, FTD, 800-Flowers, etc, versus the price they've paid online.

If you've ordered directly from one of those sites, they've built in their delivery fees and service fees that either don't get passed onto the florist or the florist's aren't given enough to fill to the value of the flowers in the arrangement.

As a real florist, we attempt to match the "look" of every piece from the wire services according to the recipes that we are given. These companies give us a recipe to follow for each arrangement that often times doesn't even include all of the flowers pictured. Or the wire services have designed the arrangement for the photo with ALL of the flowers in the recipe facing the front, but have sold us the design as a piece that should be designed all-around, instead of one-sided. This gives the customer a skewed idea of how the arrangement is going to look. We, as the filling flower shop, have to decide do we design the arrangement all the way around (which means that the look of the arrangement will NOT appear as full as the picture), or do we design it as it looks in the picture? This option would either make the back of the arrangement bare (which is a no-no) or we end up adding more flowers to make it all-around? To add more flowers, makes it impossible to meet the bottom line, especially since we do not receive all the monies paid by you the customer. Either way, the florist is not able to break-even when sending out the arrangement. I'll explain below:

The wire service keeps a percentage of the amount, as well as, not indicating to you, the customer, that your total amount doesn't go towards the arrangement, but some gets taken out for the delivery too. If you were to look online at your local florist's website and notice the same arrangement you just paid for on the national wire service's website is less, you would see that we are actually listing the real price of the arrangement and that our delivery price is listed separately at the check-out. Wouldn't you want to know what you are really paying for?

For a different option, we sometimes take the container that we have gotten from the wire services and produce our own design in them so that we can give you a better product for your $$. In these economic times, we realize that all want to get what we pay for. Just remember, you don't always get what you pay for on these national wire/floral websites. They aren't really a florist themselves, they are just a "phone center" to direct the orders to real florists. Why not, save your dollars and go directly to the real florist themselves?

We really do want to please our customers. We welcome the opportunity and would rather speak to you. The opportunity to form a relationship with our customers as we recognize their needs and likes is how we have stayed in business for over 38 years. We don't enjoy getting the orders from a "phone center", we'd rather talk to directly to you, our customer.