Business is blooming for Valentine’s Day

“When we get the flowers, we cut them, hydrate them. After a few hours we start to do processing: cleaning them and cold storing,” Sheri said.

Many of the flowers come from Colombia, Ecuador and Holland, Bobbie Chu said. They also try to source them locally from farms along the coast from Pescadero down to Salinas.

At Brown’s flower shop, an arrangement of 12 red roses goes for $175 and other colors for $155. At Chu’s, Bobbie Chu says the price depends on the customer since most arrangements are custom.

Consumers are expected this year to spend a record-high $27.5 billion on Valentine’s celebrations, with $2.9 billion spent on flowers alone, according to the National Retail Federation. In anticipation, florists begin taking orders as early as two months in advance so they can place orders with flower growers often in a different continent.

Despite the projected record-breaking sales, local shops like the Chus’ and the Browns’ face short staffing and competition with flower call centers.

“There’s two of us running the store so it keeps us very busy,” Sheri said. “We don’t have employees anymore so it’s both of us doing everything.”

They expect orders from all their regular customers and those who only shop on Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. She expects a 50% to 60% increase in sales for Valentine’s Day.

Similarly, the Chu siblings, whose parents opened the flower shop in 1967, are the only ones working the store and caring for the birds, a carryover from when their mother had an aviary as a hobby that became part of their business. It’s now scaled back, with them selling and boarding birds in a smaller section of the store. 

Yet, flowers remain the core part of the business, and last minute orders means slim pickings.

“It’s probably the worst holiday,” Bobbie Chu said. “Sometimes they wait until 3 p.m. in the afternoon the day of and they’re trying to get something but it’s too late.”

Sheri Brown many flowers are prebooked with vendors and growers but there are not a lot of arrangements from which to choose from growers leading up to today.

On top of the time crunch, florists must compete with online retailers that are oftentimes call centers that charge a customer fee and take a cut of real local florists.

“They’re not a shop, they’re just a call center and they advertise all these ridiculous specials,” Tom Chu said. “They say they have product A on their website but the shop doesn’t know what that is so the call center will just make up something and just hope that you don’t notice.”

Tom Chu recalls a time when a person in New York called asking about an order they placed through a call center that was outsourced to the Chus’ shop. He said these call centers may spoof the location of shops and connect customers with shops nowhere near each other. There was nothing Tom Chu could do but apologize to the woman and encourage her to call her local florist directly.

Bobbie Chu thinks it reflects badly on the industry.

“Whereas if they just called their local shop, then they know if it can be delivered, they know if the flowers are available, they’re not gonna pay this service charge,” she said.

Sheri echoed the same issues the Chus faced with flower call centers. Her store won’t accept any call center orders and encourages consumers to shop locally this Valentine’s Day.

“We’re an actual florist. We’re an actual business,” she said. “You’re not gonna get garbage. We take great pride in everything that we send out.”