6 Disturbing Realities Behind Your Valentine's Bouquet

I've had orders to give dead flowers to exes along with insulting notes, and have been asked if we can ship bees with our flowers. One man asked me if we knew whether his wife (a longtime customer) was allergic to any kind of flower, and if so, if we had any in stock. The most popular evil gift is stargazer lilies, which have a powerful odor that gives some people headaches. One woman offered us over a thousand dollars to buy a Rafflesia (a flower that smells like rotting meat and death). I'm guessing that her relationship status was a little rocky.

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People want cheap flowers, but roses are always in demand. It's usually around seven dollars a rose, but during Valentine's Day, a nice bouquet of a dozen red roses can go for over $100. At the shop I work at, it's usually between $70-$80 most of the year for a bouquet, but between Christmas and Valentine's, we charge $120 and up.

That's not entirely because we're greedy assholes. Hard winters reduce the number of flowers, so prices rise in that typical Schoolhouse Rock supply-and-demand way. It's not uncommon for people to call, get pissed off over our prices, and hang up ... and then call back several days later when they realize that no one else is any cheaper. By that time, we've often raised our prices again, which gets them an entirely new kind of pissed off.

But absurd rose prices aren't the florist's fault; they're your fault. Everyone wants fresh roses on Valentine's Day, but you can't simply crank them out in a factory. You have to grow them. And since roses don't store well, growers need to have a bunch of them mature just in time for the holiday. In order to do this, they sacrifice a whole December crop of roses so they'll have fresh ones in time for February. Part of what you pay for on Valentine 's Day is that lost crop. You're not only buying roses; you're buying roses, plus the furious ghosts of roses that will never be.

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First of all, roses wilt extremely quickly. Most flowers will stick around for a few weeks, but roses start to die after a few days. Expect that $100+ bouquet to be dried up and dead within a week. You probably could've picked a less ominous symbol of your love.

And then there are diseases -- you don't want to be kissed by a rose. Rose workers get tons of illnesses, and the big one is sporotrichosis (aka rose gardener's disease). We're warned about it every year. Sporotrichosis is a fungus spread by roses. If the flowers aren't cleaned properly, they can give florists and growers alike gross fungus-filled lesions. I got one on my hand, and it was like bee sting that lasted five weeks and required several doctor visits. Spororichosis is rare, since most flowers are washed and cleaned before coming into shops, but it still happens.

Also, roses are fragile, and thus doused in pesticides before they arrive at your love's door. Many of these pesticides break down, but a 1998 survey by the EPA detected a dozen separate pesticides on normal market roses. Two of those pesticides were carcinogens, and one was present at 50 times the "safe" level. Nothing says "I love you" like potential cancer. And it gets worse ...

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Things aren't any nicer for the adult workers. In Colombia and Ecuador, the world's rose basket, workers often pull 24-hour days, and two-thirds of them suffer grisly consequences from all the pesticides, like "asthma," "stillbirths," and "congenital malformations." The good news is that companies hiring these workers have taken action ... by which I mean they now require female employees to prove they've been sterilized before applying." Isn't that romantic?

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We hire extra help during the holiday just to deal with complaints. Some people have trouble handling all that extra negativity. I've had co-workers lock themselves in a closet for a few hours, and one even went to the trouble of shaping a flower arrangement into a giant middle finger.

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I've delivered to recently-divorced wives who threw the bouquets back in my face. One even set an expensive $300 arrangement on fire and threw it into her fireplace without a word to me. Then there are the bouquet deliveries to married women that are not from their husbands. One time, a husband interrogated me for five minutes on who the "secret admirer" sending his wife flowers might be. There is no training for florists, delivery people, or any profession ever that prepares you to deal with that awkwardness.

But the worst is death. I've twice found myself delivering to a widow, holding flowers ordered by her recently-deceased husband. One even came with a note instructing me to read aloud: "Harry wants to see you tonight!"

I had no idea that Harry was dead, obviously, so I basically announced in my most chipper voice that this woman should join her dead husband in the grave. She did not take it well.

Evan V. Symon is the interview finder guy at Cracked and is a member of the Personal Experience team. Have an awesome job or experience you want to see featured on Cracked? Hit us up at tips@cracked.com, and fame and fortune may soon be yours!

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