Online florist FTD.com, “the world’s oldest floral services organization,” told reader Sean that they were out of roses. Sean had ordered a flower arrangement for his wife to celebrate their sixth anniversary. When he presciently called on the day of the anniversary to verify that his order had been received and processed, Sean was told that his flowers were not available, but not to worry, since FTD still had five minutes to deliver his arrangement. Puzzled, Sean instead tried to order a simple bouquet of roses. He writes:

Don’t buy from FTD Flowers aka FTD.Com. Sept 19th was my 6th anniversary and decided to surprise my wife at work with a beautiful arrangement of roses. I order flowers online before their cutoff time. I pay the near $100 and go my merry way.

I was on my way to work several hours later when I decided maybe I should call the FTD toll free line and verify everything is correct. So I call FTD Customer Service and give them my order number and was advised by the Customer Service Agent that the arrangement I requested and paid for was unavailable for delivery. So I was like why wasn’t I told or called that it was unavailable. FTD agent advised me they would have called me to advise. I said when? She did not know. She did advise me that the cutoff for same day delivery was at 2pm. I had 5 minutes. So Im like ok…How about simple dozen roses, nothing fancy…just beautiful roses. She advised me that all their FTD Florist did not have roses. I was like your kidding , she said no. Nothing was available to be delivered and it was techinically before their “cutoff time.”

So I look online for a florist business in the area I wanted to send them that was also a FTD Florist and called them and asked if they had a dozen red roses in stock. Yes they said. Plenty but we close in 4 hours at 6pm. I said thanks and hung up.

So my warning is to people not to use FTD. Not only do they not care about customer service and their customers by not calling them when they ordered something for same day delivery, they also are lying about availability of their products.

The convenience of online florists is consistently undermined by the headaches they cause. If you need flowers, save your time and money and call your local florist.

(Photo: TonivS)

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