Mark’s Bloomin’ Journal

Change to 2008 Holiday Schedule

Due to extreme winter weather conditions in many areas of the country, FedEx is going the extra mile and will keep all FedEx Express station counters across the U.S. open from 8 a.m. to noon for customers to pick up packages on Christmas Day, Dec. 25. Couriers also will be on the road late Wednesday night to deliver as many packages as possible. FedEx Express is taking this service measure to ensure we meet our customers’ expectations, especially in the Pacific Northwest, the Great Basin and Northeastern regions, where winter storms have been severe.

Our 2008 holiday schedule has been updated to reflect this change. For additional holiday shipping information, click here.

Continue to check fedex.com for service updates or call us at 1.800.GoFedEx 1.800.463.3339. We also encourage you to check the status your shipments on fedex.com before going to any staffed FedEx location.

Thank you,

FedEx

* These special hours do not include FedEx Office locations. Find the FedEx Office nearest you to get the most up-to-date information about holiday hours.

Who could have dreamed this up for the close out of 2008 which in and of itself amounts to little but close out sales of many a dream. Throughout the year the curtain is slowly drawn back to reveal greed, stupidity, entitlement, intolerance and an arrogance brought about buy both connectivity and the fact that sometimes you no longer have to go toe to toe with your supposed tormentor. Your mortgage broker has disappeared over the horizon, Madoff had magically made your bigger investments disappear and your lowly 401K makes it look like you will be looking for yet another job for yet more years. Not to worry tho, as gas is less than bottled water by a fair margin and flat screen TV’s are almost cheap enough to be used as sleds and for sure are more plentiful than that other item here in a snowbound northwest these last two weeks. All I can say is I hope (without insulting anybody) that it is not in customer service that you get to pick up the slack that has been bestowed upon you by the fat cats, jetting with their begging bowls for our tax dollars. More than likely it will be however as one way or another we all seem to be part of that web.

Any dreams I might have entertained about the current circumstances having a little leavening effect on peoples nature when dealing with unavoidable disappointments has yet to be realized.

Take for instance the above missive from FedEx and imagine the work and agonies created for customer service agents and shippers long before it went out. We all can now sit at a keyboard and when armed with a valid credit card can summon up goods from all points of the globe, all without casting a glance out of the window or stopping to think that our not wanting to go out and chain up the tires on the car and plow the road might just mean that delivery drivers, pilots, engineers and so on may be having a real battle (often a loosing one) on their hands. All we know is that when we hit the send button and the confirmation number appears, the deal is done and snowdrifts and ice be damned… the guy in the truck will show up right on time and at the last minute. You of course have chosen to believe everything you have read or heard about free shipping, guaranteed two day shipping or heaven forbid you see a website that on the 23rd of December absolutely, positively says it can get its products to you by Christmas eve… guaranteed. This as you sit at 10F and watch snow drift four feet high around your door and have not seen hide nor hair of a FedEx or a UPS truck in three or four days. You after all, are entitled to a flawless delivery in spite of all the evidence before you. The limbs bowing to the ice that in turn snap the power lines and block the roads and leave us in the dark. The pictures of airport queues a thousand persons long living in hope of a flight days hence, the sad story of a homeless man discovered frozen dead under a makeshift shelter.

Lo and behold when it doesn’t happen because an Act Of God manages to get in the way all thoughts of Christian charity and goodwill towards mankind can go out the window. Some are going to get their pound of flesh and you are going to cajole, sweet talk or bully someone in customer service for something that just might represent a victory to you while ultimately damaging that persons position, the company or the business model. You deserve it after all, right? For certain it ruins their day and robs them of their complement of Christmas spirit. In a matter of hours yesterday I went from being an angel to an asshole as I tried to plug customer service gaps with my own take on circumstances and a certain innocence of the position. It came to the point of throwing in the towel, perhaps too late, before vitriol and anger robbed the few of us of Christmas cheer.

Customer service for flowerbud was stuck on various hilltops around the Willamette Valley and had been for days and barring a National Guard Hummer pulling them out for medical emergencies remain that way this Christmas Day. It made for minimum 12 hour days in this, the third busiest week of our company year for the couple of us that could skate to work. In the three days before Christmas I saw a handful of people on snow shoes, Cross country skiers and two kids on a sled being pulled by two insanely happy labradors. All this in the heart of metropolitan Portland, OR. As our furnace went off and on and the monitors went dark on occasion from power cuts the farms in California were all humming away and FedEx was hauling with a gusto when the Pacific Northwest flash froze and much of the rest of the country dipped into teens and single digits or became powerless. The perfect storm for retailers and carriers already bearing the brunt of a busted economy and fast running out of time. If People in Boston could not get back to Portland inside four or five days, doubtful a parcel has much more clout over a human, eh? As for the two young girls headed from Portland to Alaska and on day six in the airport…. well who knows.

Expectations are high, rightly so but understanding and education should be as high and go hand in hand. When this is not so, customer service seats can get hot. Very hot and Marshall Fields did many an employee a disservice by allowing the mantra of “the customer is always right” to take on meanings that make less sense in todays society. He might have been dealing with a different breed of customer than exists today. One of my kids chained up his jeep today and fought his way to a FedEx depot…. kindly opened as advertised above… to claim Christmas presents for family. When there he witnessed people screaming abuse at the poor customer service people about the failure of overnight and two day service…. all this in the faces of people giving up Christmas morning to help make others Christmas’s a bit richer. He is a big kid, works some for FedEx Ground himself and the abusers are just lucky they did not get picked up and summarily escorted to the depths of the nearest snow bank. He witnessed very poor treatment of customer service personnel.

On the other side of the coin my youngest kid and friends made a long snowy hike down from a hilltop to catch a chained up bus to take in a Portland Trailblazer game against Denver. Boarding the bus the driver promptly announced she had enough of driving and it was time for break. By the time the bus was set to move again the game was as good as done. The kids (who buy their own ball game and bus tickets) had only a long hike back up a frosty hill to reward their efforts… and of course as a local game it was not televised on any channel they had access too. They witnessed very poorly explained customer service by someone in the service industry.

So this whole vendor/customer relationship thing is fraught and often it goes astray when people show intolerance, unpleasantness or are demanding. In our case at flowerbud it mainly stems from a perception that FedEx is godlike and can do no wrong. Their planes and trucks and personnel can go where others fear to tread. From my decade of experience with them they get the job done for the most part if it can be done. What they have been clever in doing is presenting themselves as infallible when in fact all they do is push the fallibility factor off onto multitudes of merchants who may well be flawless in their part of the transaction. It is a shared responsibility as is the transaction between any merchant and customer if it is too bear fruit long past the 70% off sales, free shipping and guaranteed by Christmas hype. Give the country some cold temps, snow drifts and a surplus of last minute cargo…its a great reason for shopping early or late.

As I sign off for further Christmas cheer I might make humorous mention of buying one item that was sold as “guaranteed” by Christmas, that I went for and that was the only gift that did make it. For a further and rather generous $24 donation to President elect Barack Obama a guy could get a nifty little stocking hat with which to battle the cold disappointment of break time TriMet buses not delivering you to the Rose Garden. It was delivered by the USPS against all odds and I can only think it bodes well for this presidency and its efforts to deliver us from the current state of affairs.

Although it is still December I was asked to write an article on how best to make a persons V Day flowers last. It seemed to me this information pertains to any day, named holiday or otherwise. So here you go, a few pearls of wisdom;

How do you make your Valentine’s Day flowers last longer, how do you make any day’s flowers last longer if it comes to that? Like so much in life it is simple, absurdly simple, but then as is the way of this world we have made simple difficult to find and impossible to comprehend. I wonder that we sell flowers at all when I see information about purchase, care and maintenance written as so much mumbo jumbo rather than common sense and simple science as “experts” lay claim to common knowledge.
VOODOO
We so often forsake common sense and instead we place upon pedestals the rubbish that is part urban myth and part the pap of monthly glossies that feel bound if not entitled to re create the wheel. Add to that some know it all “celebrity name” and…bingo, you can find yourself cutting stems at oblique angles with fancy French knives, tossing pennies into vases and replacing water with soda, or as hard as this may be to swallow… adding that little blue ED pill! Little wonder you might think that flowers can last for inordinate amounts of time. In your dreams!
EXPEDIENCY/EDUCATION
Wasting no more time or energy lets just cut right to the simple science of obtaining the best bloom for the buck on Feb 14th or 364 other days. Flowers are grown on farms large and small around the world and with air-freight as efficient as it is those flowers are landing on our shores from the farthest reaches of both hemispheres mere hours after harvesting. It is at this point that you need commence your homework.
As landed, the flowers are “fresh” and for the best part have been maintained within “the cold chain”. How quickly they then move through the marketing and distribution system and into your green thumbed hands is key to your satisfaction. Add unnecessary days to this equation and no end of fancy cutting, soda pop or currency in vases will help put the blush on your rose or gild your lily.
Find out when the flower deliveries are made to your provider and learn to differentiate between old stock held over and “the good stuff” that just arrived from the farm. Purchase the new stock as it arrives. Ask questions of staff. No qualified, coherent or believable staff? Take a pass. Would you buy moldy cheese or rotten fruit? Seek fine wine from a beer salesman? Not likely.
AGE/STAGE
Be prepared to buy flowers that are NOT in bloom…they really are supposed to bloom when in your possession, not the vendors. Remember that most flowers in bloom can’t be transported easily or efficiently. Gerbera Daisies are an exception you may recognize. For example it takes approximately four days for a lily purchased from a Flowerbud.com farm to come into bloom and likely seven days to attain peak display which it then might hold for another seven. If in a store you see such a flower in full bloom all scrunched inside a cellophane sleeve, like a prisoner at the bars then you already know that it has done hard time and is not remotely fresh. You are not the parole officer. That’s common sense, right?
DRINKING
So now you arrive home with mostly closed flower buds, or better yet FedEx has just delivered a green Flowerbud.com box laden with farm fresh stems. First things first…flowers are thirsty, especially those arriving in a box by overnight courier. Imagine yourself taking the red eye from Memphis. Immediately clip a new end on each and every stem and place them, while still wrapped and/or sleeved in a supportive, clean container to drink cool clean water for a few hours. More the better is very much the case here. I have been known to use the WC in the spare bathroom to hold them… it makes changing the water a snap.
Take a vase that is sized to the flowers you purchased and cleanse it thoroughly. No vase? Then use a jam jar, an old kettle, a beer mug, a cleaned out paint can. Use your imagination. Remember, whatever the container it must be capable of supporting the stems. They do not fare well when having the chance to bend excessively under their own weight, as inevitably the stem will break. Fill it some half full of clean water.
ARRANGING
Take your now hydrated stems and clipping each one to a length you think best suits the vase, arrange within. Each stem can be of differing length depending on the appearance you seek. Clip a little off the stem and test how it looks to you in the vase. If too long, clip more. Perhaps this takes two or three patient attempts, that being far preferable to clipping too drastically in the first place and then feverishly having to look for a bud vase to cater to the runt you just created from a premium long stem.
All the while remember you are not a florist and not a flower arranger of note and neither are you pretending to be… just yet. Your chance to emulate Preston Bailey lies still just over the horizon. Just think, the rules are yours to make and that your version of flower arranging is above all else, fun. Try and try again might well be the order of the day. The flowers will not criticize, rather they will in due course hide floral faux pas, real or imagined. In the final placement in the vase make allowance for all those opening buds and never ever leave foliage on the stem that will be submerged below the water line. That’s good science, right?
CLIMATE CONTROL
You now have freshly harvested and fully hydrated flowers with lower stems free from foliage arranged to your taste in a container of your choice. Place them in the location you had in mind and turn down the thermostat a few degrees…. a few more please. Flowers, like food spoil less quickly at lower temperatures so you and your flowers must arrive at a compromise that sees neither of you perish too quickly. You really are in control here and the odd goose bump on you will add days to your flowers … while lessening your utility bill and allowing for a smugness over your more dainty carbon footprint.
LONGEVITY/REWARD
Fresh, sated, clean and cool…these are your flowers. They feel so pampered you can almost see them preen and hear them cooing. To keep them this way I want you to carry them over to the sink every second or third day and remove all from the vase. Clip a new end on each and every stem. An inch will suffice, you then rinse the stems thoroughly under running water to rid them of any debris or slime that may be forming. Wash the vase out with soapy warm water until sparkling, refill with clean water and re arrange the stems. You won’t believe me when I tell you how long these simple steps will add to the life of your flowers so I will resist giving you a number. Rather you can brag to me, much as my mother does on a transatlantic phone call when three weeks into the last of her bouquet and the cobwebs are thick.
Bear in mind that differing flowers age at differing paces so within a mixed bouquet some will pass before others. It is your job to remove these and rearrange those left when you are clipping, rinsing and washing. A value proposition thus spelled out is a labor of love. Once learned and witnessed never forgotten. So as you ponder over the weighty yet never asked question of just how long do you really need flowers to last repeat after me…
FRESH FLOWERS ARE SELDOM OPEN UPON PURCHASE.
FRESH FLOWERS ARE THIRSTY.
FRESH FLOWERS APPRECIATE GOOD HYGIENE.
FRESH FLOWERS LIKE IT COLD.
FRESH FLOWERS CONTINUE TO APPRECIATE GOOD HYGIENE.
“OLD” FRESH FLOWERS NEED TO BE REPLACED @ FLOWERBUD.COM.