A Mother of the Bride's Real Warning about Flowers Ordered over the Internet Arriving in Brown Boxes!

via Florist Detective   ...This is what arrived in the box!

I know you've seen the ads:  200 roses for $89!  All your wedding flowers for just $150!  I just warned you in a prior post what can happen  - flowers coming to you delivered over a day or two in hot or freezing weather can end up dead or severely wilted....then what will you do, because the company that shipped them is in South America or someplace else in the U.S.? Or what if they don't send you the right flowers?  It's not a local person who can fix it for you!

Here's a snippet from a real Mother of the Bride talking about her daughter's experience ordering from a South American grower.  She is writing from the point of view that "silk" flowers (actually polyester) are the way to go.  However, my take on that is...no matter how beautiful, those faux silk flowers are mass produced in China.  I do, however, love the handmade artisan blooms that you see on places like Etsy or Artfire or 1000markets.  To each their own!  Real, fresh flowers, however, are fleeting and precious and invoke a great memory...not only do I have great memories of my wedding day flowers, for the first five years of anniversaries, my dear hubby would give me a dozen roses per year - so on the fifth anniversary, I got 60 roses!

I digress!  Here's the true story:


"Beware of “growers’ co-ops” on the internet who operate out of South America, who offer a jaw-dropping quantity of roses for a few hundred dollars–and they offer an amazing assortment, as well.  We used ‘BigRose.com’ for my daughter’s wedding.  We ordered and paid for the roses 4 months in advance.  They called us a few days before the wedding to tell us “sorry, but we will not have the exact shade of red” we had paid for months in advance, so were sending a mix of similar shades. They stopped speaking English when we protested.  We quickly realized that, so close to the wedding, there was no chance we could get this quantity from anywhere else at the last minute  (and certainly not for the money), so we decided that mixing dark reds would have to do.  Imagine our shock when they sent not only mixed reds, but hot pink and peach–for an all-red wedding!  We had relatives combing every Costco and grocery store in town–and because of this unplanned-for scurrying, we DID make up most of the difference in quantity–but additionally, the South American roses, which were supposed to be thornless, arrived with as many thorns as petals–HUGE, rainforest-caliber thorns!–and thus took a far, far longer time–requiring each stem and thorn to be shaved down before they could be made into bouquets–than the time we had allowed–and we had tried to overestimate.  It all turned out beautiful, but the florist among us had punctured, bloody, inflamed hands.  Back to that reliable old expression, “If it seems too good to be true–it probably is.”  (You’d think we might have recourse, but my bank refused to pursue the matter because the seller did have a Fed-Ex receipt showing that goods were delivered–even it wasn’t the goods we ordered.) "

via Hemmroidz blog