Consumer Beware

Consumer Beware: Your Floral Order May Cost 2X What You Expect

The price tag of a product or service tells consumers how much they will have to pay if they choose to make a purchase. If only it was that simple. I’ve ordered flowers before, and I knew exactly what I was about to experience, but it always amazes me what my final bill turns out to be.

I wanted to send flowers to a friend in a different state, so I turned to a national floral service to make it happen. My eyes lit up as a sale advertisement was splashed across their front page. I searched through the arrangements and found one that was on sale for $24.97. I thought this was a decent deal on a very nice looking floral grouping. I added it to my cart and clicked on the button to checkout. As I reviewed my order, I was somewhat surprised to see the total price was $57.31.

My final price was over twice the advertised price of the flowers.

How could this be? Let’s look at the details of my bill:

• Flowers: $24.97
• Vase : $12.99
• Standard Delivery: $14.99
• Care and Handling : $2.99
• Tax : $4.37
• Vase Discount (Wow, Thanks!): -$3.00

Total: $57.31

Flowers

The price of the flowers is actually pretty good. It looked to be a complex arrangement, very colorful, with a nice variety of flowers. All of that for just under $25 is reasonable to me.

Vase

$13 for a vase? Ok, they discounted $3 as part of the sale….but really $10 for a vase? Obviously they’re making a profit on this too. I’m not required to buy a vase, so this up-charge is purely on me to ensure the recipient has something to put the flowers in.

Delivery

Here’s where it gets a little misleading, in my opinion.  They should just call this the, “What we pay the local florists to handle the order” fee. I searched the website to try to get delivery quotes before actually picking a flower arrangement, but I couldn’t do it. The only way most customers are going to discover the delivery fee is to pick and arrangement and begin the checkout process. By that time, many customers are already time invested into the process, and will just pay it.

Tax

The government gets it’s share.

Care And Handling

I have no idea what this is for. I see the words, but what I read is, “Extra profit for us without raising our prices.”

I find this sort of pricing with hidden fees to be rather deceptive. Even though I knew this would happen, it still surprised me for some reason. A good rule of thumb is when ordering flowers, the actual cost is going to be about 2x the advertised cost. That will help me immensely with sticking to my budget when ordering flowers to be delivered.

How about you, Clever Friends? Have you ever experienced a massive markup with flower delivery or any other product? Do you think this is slightly deceptive?

Brought to you courtesy of Brock

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Brock Kernin

Brock is a software engineer by day and personal finance blogger at night. He is a fitness junkie and enjoys grilling and smoking meat. Married with two children,  Brock strives to improve his skills as a husband and father, and is always on the lookout to stretch his family’s budget as far as he can.