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.