**Warning** about Anne's Flowers

[joe white]

I wanted to educate people on how Anne's flowers does business and to stress to people to shop around first. I bought a Calla Lilly plant in a wicker basket for over $70 form Anne's, being told it just came in and hard to find etc. When I went to repot the plant and took the liner pot out of the wicker basket (very cheap wicker basket) there was a Home Depot sticker on it for $19.98. My gut told me that the price I paid was high for that plant but I do like to support our local businesses, but this was a huge rip off!!! When I called to confirm that this is their practice (which it was confirm it is) the flippant response was "we buy our flowers from all over, Home Depot, Whole Foods, Osh..." with dead silence afterwards.

[Elizabeth Medel]

I once went in to buy a bouquet to take to babyland. I just wanted a small bouquet and was told to go into the refrigerated section and "pick my own" which I found really strange and a little bit creepy. I just thought this was really unprofessional and I've never been back since.

[Bryan W]

Hi Joe,
I'm having a hard time dissecting the offensive part of what happened.

This is what businesses do, they buy cheap, perform value-add (marketing counts!), and then sell at a higher price. Once you take the attitude that everything's negotiable, there's not much meat in this complaint, beyond the rather flippant (or transparent -depending on how you look at the glass) response from the seller. If the Home Depot sticker wasn't in there, would you have thought twice?

I'm resigned to the realization that we'll all pay the "dummy tax" when we visit some of these shops, for lack of personal initiative or creativity over convenience :)
Good lesson though.

-Bryan