Flower shop owners have something of a love-hate relationship with this day for lovers. Valentine’s Day is stupendous for business but it makes life incredibly hectic for those who arrange and deliver beautiful bouquets. Scott Taylor runs a flower shop in Council Bluffs/Omaha and says his crew has been working nearly round-the-clock for several days now.
Taylor says: "The business grows tenfold as what we’d compare to a normal day. A typical day in our business, we take about 50 to 75 deliveries. On that one day, we’ll take approximately 800 to 12-hundred deliveries." He says Mother’s Day is usually the store’s busiest day of the year, but Valentine’s Day is a close second. Taylor has had to boost his staff to make sure they can handle the load.
"Three to four days out before Valentine’s Day, we start producing the bouquets and then we sell off of what we produced," he explains, "also, our design staff increases to about 25 and our delivery staff increases to about 25 to 30 trucks delivering that day." If you’re lucky enough to get flowers at the office and want to take the bouquet home, here’s a bit of advice from Taylor — reuse that protective plastic.
He says: "That wrapping is on there for a reason. When they get their flowers and they unwrap them at the office, when they go to take them home with them, save that wrapping, put the wrapping on top of them because we get a lot of people who throw that wrapper away. They’ll take their flowers out into the elements and the flowers will freeze. They are perishable products and they really don’t like that super-cold weather." Taylor says your flowers will last a long time if you change the water daily.