12/20/2024
It’s engagement season, a time of huge joy, excitement and … sticker shock at the price of wedding flowers. So I figure it’s a good time to share with you all again my thoughts on why:
Flowers are expensive.
It is a joy to go out in our yards and cut some flowers that just appear as the seasons change, but annual cultivated flowers take planning, seeding, planting, caring, staking, pruning, cutting, processing. There’s a lot to growing those perfect stems. Flowers are a labor intensive product to grow and the people who do that, often back breaking, labor deserve to get paid a living wage.
Another reason we don’t think flowers should cost much is because of those supermarket bouquets. Supermarket flowers have gone a long way in devaluing flowers. We are so used to going in to our local grocery store or Trader Joe’s and picking up a bouquet of flowers for under $10. That is not what flowers cost! Trader Joe’s, for example, sells their flowers at a loss because it’s a great way to get people into their stores. But that hurts the industry as a whole.
Local farmers and florists have an uphill battle to climb to fight that expectation. How do we explain to our customers that a single peony in a bridal bouquet costs $10.80 when you can pick up 10 stems for $9 at Trader Joe’s?? That’s one-third the wholesale cost of peonies.
So you start with a $3 wholesale cost for a peony, how does it get to $10.80?
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