Throughout recent history, when you wanted to send somebody flowers, you would walk into your local Las Vegas flower shop; make your selection, place your order and your Florist would deliver your flowers locally to whomever you wanted to send them to. Soon after that, florists were able to use a service that most of us have called a wire service. A wire service allows us to send orders between states, while providing you with a local brick and mortar store to walk into, make your selection and come back to if there is a problem with your order.

The way that a wire service works financially is when you place your order here with us at our brick and mortar store and we wire it out to another florist in another state for delivery, we will make 20% of the total cost of that order, the wire service will make 10% and the Filling Florist in another state will make 70% of the cost of that order plus their delivery charge to deliver that order to your loved one. With the advent of the internet, many online businesses started popping up all over the world which are nothing more than big call centers that will advertise in your phone book, on the internet, T.V., and radio with artificially low prices to entice you to call them and place your order with them which they will wire out and keep the 20% of your total order cost as well as usually charging you somewhere around a $15 to $20 service fee for doing so. We call these companies “order gatherers” and they are the enemy of the real local florist.

The reason they are our enemy is that they will pluck our local customers business directly out of our backyards and attempt to sell it back to us at pennies on the dollar while charging the customer an inflated price to do so. This is a lose-lose situation for you as well as the filling florist who is designing your order.

What a lot of filling florists do to circumvent the loss incurred by these order gatherers is to only fill the order with flowers up to the 70% that they are receiving. So in essence, if you paid $50 for an arrangement, you’ve also paid $10 for delivery and a $17 service fee, you’ve paid $77 plus tax bringing the total to somewhere above $80. When the filling florist gets this order that originally started at $50, and they only make 70% of the cost of that order, some florists, not us, but some florists will only fill that order to $35. You’ve just paid over $80 for a $35 arrangement. This is bad for you and it’s bad for the filling florist. In our industry, it would be by most standards considered unethical to fill the order to less than what the original price was, but, it does happen and it happens all the time. Furthermore, you have no knowledge of or communication with the filling florist to attempt to discern their ethics or stance on this issue.

We send a lot of orders out from our shop here across state lines because there are still people who like to walk in to their local florist to send their orders. We also have many corporate customers who just want the convenience, but, we would be doing the customer a disservice if we didn’t educate you that the absolute best way to send flowers out of state is to call the florist in that state directly, avoiding the service fees, making sure that you get your money’s worth and your flowers will be filled to the price that you paid. This is good for you and it’s also good for the filling florist.

Boycott the order gatherers and call a real florist directly.