Flowers insolita Blog

Don't waste your money on flower-order middle-man!

If you order flower delivery online, chances are that you are placing your order with a middle-man.  And you are paying an unnecessary middle-man’s fee, without realizing it.

For example, when you place your order with a well-known national flower company (the one whose name starts with “1″), you will be charged with $13.99.  They call it “Service Fee” and you will not see this fee till the very last step of ordering.

This $13.99 is NOT a delivery or “Shipping & Handling” fee, which is already included in the merchandise price.  This fee is nothing but a middle-man’s surcharge.

In fact, there’s no need to pay this extra fee at all.  How can you avoid this completely unnecessary fee?

Call a local florist in the destination town directly, that’s how.  Middle-men, including the one that starts with “1″, send your order to one of those local florists anyway.  They earn 20% sales commission from the florist in the process (in addition to the middle-man’s surcharge).

For more info about flower-order middle-men and their deceptive tactics to rip you off,  read Fake “Local Florists”.  For a full explanation, visit Florist Detective.

In the previous post, I wrote how yellowpages.com lists numerous bogus florists in their local listing.  What about their main competitor, superpages.com by Verizon?

If you look for ‘florists’ in ‘Huntington NY’ in superpages.com, you will be presented with “only” 73 florists, which is a vast improvement compared to >1,400 “florists” listed in yellowpages.com.

But again, our town doesn’t have 73 florists.  Not even close.

Most of these 73 florists are national floral-order brokers, such as FTD, JustFlowers, etc.

Let’s sort by ‘distance’ again, which is supposed to list only the local florists.  Take a look (Click).

At the top, you will see a business called “Huntington Florists NY – All American Flowers.”

This is a bogus florist that doesn’t exist in Huntington.  In fact they are located in 4201 Church St, suite 2, Mt Laurel, NJ.  They aren’t even a florist.

This bogus “florist” in NJ does this all over the US and Canada.  They are a well-known crook in our industry.

Verizon knows about them and does nothing.  No surprise here.

Do you think Yellowpages are reliable sources of local businesses?  Well, think again.

If you look for ‘Florists’ in ‘Huntington NY’ in yellowpages.com (AT&T), you will be presented with a list of 1,435 florists. We can safely tell you that our town doesn’t have 1,435 florists.  Who are they?  They are various businesses in Long Island and elsewhere who claim to serve Huntington NY.  OK, fair enough.

So let’s click on ‘distance’ tab, which is supposed to list only the florists physically located in Huntington.  Take a look (click).

You will see our listing and a few of our local competitors, fine.

But who are ’1StopFlorists’ ‘Floral Ftd Directory Information’ ‘Floral Teleflora Directory Information’ ‘Huntington Florist Concierge’ and so on?

They are bogus florists who don’t even exist in our town.

How did they manage to be listed in Huntington?  They purchased either 800/888 numbers or even local number (631) with bogus local addresses (let’s say 1234 main street). These companies do this, not only in Huntington, but everywhere in the US and Canada.

Many florists complain to yellowpages.com.  They ignored us.  As long as they earn ad revenues from these bogus florists who hurt local businesses, AT&T doesn’t care.

So, I would not trust Yellowpages.com.  If they allow this sort of practice for florists, I believe that there are many other similar bogus listings for other types of businesses.

“Local” listing?  What a joke.

A well-known dot-com flower company (whose name begins with a number) has been busy promoting “Free shipping or No Service Charge” ad campaign.

A misleading word play.  Here’s the truth…
Most consumers will not get what they might think they are getting: Free delivery of florists-delivered products.  Delivery charge is hidden and consumers still pay these charges.

What consumers don’t pay this time is a middleman’s commission called “Service Charge” which, if they call a local florist directly, they don’t have to pay in the first place.

Please see the chart below.

In this example, a consumer is sending a $40 bouquet.

If she calls a local florist directly (right column), she would be told how much her delivery charge would be ($10 in this example).  With sales tax, she would be paying a little over $54 in this example.

She would have to pay >$15 more if she went through .com flower companies.

Take a look at the left column.

First of all, her delivery charge would be “included” (meaning “hidden“) in the price listed in their web page.  It doesn’t matter which .com flower companies she goes (FT*, 1800*, or whatever, all the same).  Delivery charges are always hidden.

What does it mean?  Well, what it means is that, to order a $40 bouquet, she would have to order a $50 bouquet on their web ($40 plus $10 hidden delivery charge).

If she ordered a $40 bouquet, thinking that she is sending $40-worth of flowers, she will be disappointed….

Or not.  Because she won’t be seeing the flowers delivered, she won’t know how tiny her gorgeous “$40″ bouquet would look like, – the fact that these .com companies are fully taking advantage of.

Wait….  It actually gets even more interesting.

During checkput, they will charge her a “Service Change” (or “Handling Charge”), usually in the range of $12-15.  She would think this is a delivery charge.

Sorry, but she is wrong.

This “Service Charge” is a middleman’s commission that this .com company keeps in their pocket.  It has nothing to do with delivery fee.

All in all, she would end up paying $69.51 on their website, >$15 more than is necessary.  Isn’t this a rip-off?

We believe it is, and can be completely avoided if consumers call a local florist direct.  Virtually all of us have 1-800 numbers and many of us now have a website for you to place order online.

Maybe our site is a little more inconvenient than national .com flower websites.  But you don’t pay the middleman’s commission here!

What this national .com company is saying in this ad campaign is that, because they are afraid of losing sales, they will remove this middleman’s rip-off fee for the time being.

Should you jump onto this opportunity to take advanatge of this “free” offer?  We are not so sure about that.

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. 

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.

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.

As some of you already know, Internet “florists” are not florists.  They are “Order Gatherers”, the middlemen who just take your order and then pass it to a real florist, earning the sales commission in the process.  (Read our article “fake local florist” for more info).

On the New Year’s Eve (Dec 31st), one of those Order Gatherer* sent us one such order to be delivered the next day (Jan 1st).  The order was a funeral spray and the destination was someone’s home.

Two things were very wrong in this order.  First, they didn’t bother checking to see if we were open on Jan 1st (we were not).  This tells you how irresponsible these Order Gatherers are.

Second, it is totally inappropriate to send a big funeral spray to a residence (where are they going to put it, anyway?).  Any responsible florist would have advised the customer to change his/her selection.  Not this Order Gather.

We sent them the following message:

“A spray is not an appropriate choice to send to a home. Please advise or send a cancel.”

To which they replied as follows (all small letters):

“please send as the customer ordered. that is what they wanted. you can make it appropriate for a home but just because you dont like it doesn’t mean our customer doesn’t. thanks”

Clearly, this Order Gathering doesn’t care about anything, as long as they get paid. No grieving family wants a funeral spray in their living room. Because they are not the one who would have to deal with the upset recipient, there is no reason to make sure the gift would be appropriate.

We rejected the order and asked them to remove us from their list. They still sent us two more orders.

* They call themselves “FTDfloristonline.com/flowers.”  They advertise in online yellowpages and google. They also says “free delivery”; but they don’t “deliver”, so what thye are not charging is actually “service charge”, not “delivery fee.”  If you call a florist direct without this scam middleman, you won’t pay any “service charge” in the first place.

Linnea Johansson said in a USA Weekend magazine that flower arrangements can be a total rip-off for parties.  Now, SAF (Society of American Florists), of which we are a member, formerly protested to both Ms Johansson and USA Weekend magazine.  Here’s the quote…

“While SAF understands and appreciates the need to provide readers with decorating options, the negative statement seems unfair and unnecessary, as the advice following the comment can stand on its own,” SAF writes in letters to USA WEEKEND and Johansson. “You may want to consider that some readers enjoy the convenience and appeal of professionally designed floral arrangements, especially during the busy time of party preparation.”