Happy Mother’s Day!
Are you planning on honoring your mother today? Are you still connected to your mother or has that tether been severed? As promised yesterday in my article — How FTD Ruined Mother’s Day — here are the flowers that were picked and paid for, then never delivered or sniffed:

I hope you enjoy your day!

25 Comments

  1. What a shame she will never get to see them!
    We are not celebrating Mothers Day today – Mothers Day in the UK is celebrated on the Christian “Mothering Sunday” – the second Sunday before Easter – ie a different date each year – fixed to the Church calendar.
    Hope you and yours are having a good day.

  3. Hi Nicola!
    Yeah. They were a “Citrus Bouquet” and I, too, really love the color.
    It’s fascinating how Mother’s Day in the UK is fixed to the Christian calendar. Does everyone celebrate or only those who believe in the Christ child?
    I just tripped down the stairs. So my shoulder is entirely bruised along with my knees and wrist and fingers. Typing this to you is the test of my indignity. 😀

  5. Hi David,
    I’m glad it wasn’t a lobster or a steak dinner with all of the side dishes that you were sending your mother.
    Are the flowers lost forever, or are they just delayed in transit someplace?

  6. Hi David,
    Beautiful picture. Did you send it Janna’s mom?
    Surely somewhere on the net there is a website that offers “virtual tours of bouquets”?
    Donna

  7. IS THAT A NEW CHRIS HEDGES AVATAR!??? Love it! If you want me to use that Avatar in place of the one on our Authors page, Chris, send it to me!
    We are uncertain about the flowers. Janna called her mom this morning and she said she got lots of flowers. She has lots of children, so Janna tried to figure out if they were from us or not — the flowers she got were “red and purple” — so we are trying to figure out if something “from us” was sent to her or not but nothing she received resembles what we chose and paid for and we have no credit yet on our card… so the FTD mystery deepens…

  8. Hi Donna!
    We sent Janna’s mom our “How FTD Ruined Mother’s Day” article to explain what happened. We don’t want to disappoint her even more with an image of delightful flowers that were never delivered…

  9. Hi David,
    I have a new avatar!
    I was looking around the web and saw that someone questioned some of FTD’s cost-cutting last year.

    Some years ago, Peter Lynch described the practice of selling one’s winners and keeping one’s losers as harvesting the flowers to grow the weeds. Ironically, FTD management, in my opinion, is doing exactly that. Slashing of unnecessary expenses is a good thing, but cutting important expenses on a distribution system that drives your business seems foolhardy.

  11. David,
    What a lovely bouquet. I am a big fan of flowers in more exotic colors and arrangements. Those yellow roses (and whatever those other yellow things are) are perfect!
    I have a busy Mother’s Day today! I am going to a cookout at my Stepmother’s mom’s house for a little while. Then I am taking my mother to dinner and a movie. Hopefully I will not make anyone else sick, or myself sicker! 😀

  12. Chris!
    Your new Avatar is now active on our Authors page. Yay! You look grand!
    Thanks for that unfortunate FTD link. Janna and I have been looking around here and in the Midwest and may of the smaller local flower shops are no longer in business. I wonder what that indicates?

  14. Everyone mucks in now – very commercialised.
    Hope you have put ice on the bruises and you are not in too much discomfort.

  16. Hi David,
    The smaller florists might have been put out of business by Costco and other larger stores that offer roses and other flowers for inexpensive prices. I know that I usually go to Costco to get flowers. But, I’ve also noticed some of the florists around here have been keeping their prices in line to keep up with the competition. In our area, you can also find roadside vendors who sell flowers for cheap prices.

  17. Hi Chris!
    We’ve found that the small flower shops have been replaced by the “Big Name” wholesalers like Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club and other “bulk power buying” entities.
    Good flowers are expensive, and to cover your nut, I’m sure you have to pay a higher price to get good flowers — much more than the bulk buyers have to carry…

  18. Hi David,
    With the smaller florists, you are also paying for the delivery service, vase, and all of the other stuff that has to be bought separately. I bet when it comes down to it, the price is the same if buy cheap flowers, but end up having to buy a nice vase, then go deliver them someplace, especially when gas is $3+ per gallon.

  19. Hi David,
    The pic looks good on the author’s page! I used my little Samsung for the photo and added the “flash” effect with GIMP.

  20. Hi Chris!
    FTD charged us $10 for a vase! That was a surprise.
    I know the “better flowers” are more expensive to purchase — and they go to the bulk purchasers like restaurants and the top end florists — while the “other flowers” are left for bundling purchase by the rest of us.

  22. Hi David,
    I tried adding an animated avatar to WordPress, but it didn’t work. I had the regular image as one layer, copied that image 6 or 7 times, then added the “flash” effect to the second layer. It was pretty nifty because the normal image would display for 600ms, then the flash would appear for 100ms, over and over.
    Here’s an example.
    It’s pretty easy to make all sorts of annoying images that flash and jitter and do all sorts of things! :mrgreen:

  23. Now that’s a great Avatar, Chris! I love the Flashing! :mrgreen:
    Isn’t there something notorious about using .GIF images that are animated? Wasn’t there something insidious about them that causes most browsers and websites to disable them?

  24. Hi David,
    I think most of the animated .GIF images drive people crazy, but I’ll have to see if there is some danger associated with them.

  25. Here ya go, Chris:

    Animated spam
    As spam filters have become adept at filtering these images (albeit with random elements added to attempt to avoid hashing or detection), spammers have adapted to use animated GIFs. In August 2006 the first animation-based trick was added to [2]: ‘Animated Noise’.
    In ‘Animated Noise’ the spammer sends an animated GIF with a number of decoy frames that consist solely of random noise, and a single frame that contains the actual spam message. The real frame appears for a long period of time (for example, it may stay visible for ten minutes), whereas the decoy frames appear before and after the real frame and last mere milliseconds. The spammer is attempting to fool the spam filter into missing the real frame, although examination of the animation times makes the real frame easy to detect.

    http://www.virusbtn.com/spambulletin/archive/2006/11/sb200611-image
    That’s a fascinating page on how Spammers wonk the system!

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