Look, Ma! It Was on Sale!

May 11, 2006

Yesterday, I bought Mother’s Day presents. A nice bouquet of flowers for my mom, and another for my grandma.

Because… well, you know. In between the godless heathenry and incorrigible sass, I do try to be a good kid. As best I can, anyway.

The flowers seemed very nice, and will hopefully arrive fresh and bloomy on Saturday morning, to the delight of the ladies from whose loins I sprang — either directly, or by proxy through a younger generation of fertile female.

One thing I was struck by while shopping, though, is the smarminess with which petal peddlers run their establishments. I checked out a few sites online — FTD.com, 800-Flowers, and others — before finding something suitable. And they all had the same gimmicky hook on the detail page of every Mother’s Day bit of swag:

‘Special offer! Huge discounts! Buy now and SAAAAVE!!!‘

First of all, is ten or fifteen percent really going to make the difference when shopping for a gift that says, ‘Thank you for decades of unconditional, unwavering, and often unappreciated ‘Mother’s Love’‘? If you don’t get the special offer deal, will you throw up your hands over the extra four bucks, give up, scribble a ‘Happy Moms’ Day, nice lady!‘ on the back of a cocktail napkin, and call it a day?

No. I didn’t think so. Not unless you’re Norman Bates. Or one of the Gotti kids, maybe.

“If you don’t get the special offer deal, will you throw up your hands over the extra four bucks, give up, scribble a ‘Happy Moms’ Day, nice lady!‘ on the back of a cocktail napkin, and call it a day?”

Besides, those price cuts and ‘instant savings’ are a big crock of momshit in the firrst place. These are Mother’s Day bouquets, for chrissakes. To offer a ‘Ten percent off the regular price , if you act now!‘ deal is just plain conniving.

When would you pay the ‘regular’ price on these flowers, anyway? Maybe if you were buying Mothers’ Day nosegays in the middle of fricking August, to beat the rush. But how does that work when the actual holiday rolls around?

‘Happy Mothers’ Day, Ma! Look, I bought you some stems and wilted brown leaves. But back in the fall, these flowers were spectacular!‘

Come on, there, sparky. She raised you better than that, and you know it.

Still, if the florists are going to ‘offer’ good ‘deals’ for this ‘holiday’, why not make it a little more exciting? No schmucks have ever actually paid whatever theoretical ‘full price’ you’ve come up with — so why not send that fantasy price through the roof? Charge me the same price you do now — but don’t tell me I’m getting a measly ten percent off. Where’s the fun in that?

Instead, claim I’m getting ninety percent off, or even more. We both know that nobody in the history of your shop ever paid the ‘full price’, so humor me, dammit. List the bouquet as costing the gross national product of a small Central American country, or the bar tab tally for a John Goodman night on the town. Whichever’s more expensive.

Then, charge me the same few dozen bucks you’re already asking, and tell me I just got a steal. Hey, if these flowers ‘regularly‘ cost six figures or more a dozen, then they’ve got to be good, right? Everybody wins!

As it is, I feel like I’m getting played, somehow. And by a florist, which just adds insult to indigo violets. If you get ripped off by a florist, you can’t go to the cops. They’d laugh you right out of the precinct.

But for Mother’s Day, it’s a chance I’ll have to take. It’s either that, or make my own card out of construction paper and Elmer’s Glue, and send that along to her. And I outgrew that phase a long time ago. Like, after last Christmas.

(I colored Rudolph’s nose myself on that card. I was very proud, too.)

I suppose the important thing is that bright, smelly, leafy plants will soon be whisked along to my mother’s and grandmother’s residences. And what better way to say, ‘I love you, ma!‘ than:

‘Hey, look! This year, I didn’t get you a crappy cardboard card, or send you nasty flowers I bought nine months ago!‘

See? I told you I’m a good kid sometimes.