The weather report does not look for most of the eastern seaboard. How are you handling V-Day deliveries with winter storms?
Winter Storm - Valentine's Day Deliveries
- Thread starter Katie Hendrick
- Start date
What we've done in the past is to move everything up a day. If we expected bad weather on the 14th, we'd move Feb. 14 deliveries to the 13th and Feb. 13th deliveries to the 12th. We'd add a tag that read "Due to impending bad weather, this delivery may be earlier than requested by the sender. We appreciate your understanding. Please enjoy your floral gift!" We did this at least twice and never received one complaint! This year is more problematic, likely giving us problems on both days. The bad weather is expected for most of the day on the 13th and into the early part of the 14th. Today, we've been suggesting to customers that, due to the anticipated bad weather, they consider taking delivery today. So far, the response has been positive. That means we need to turn the order around quickly and get it out today, but that's what we do on a normal day! In the long run, we're hoping that will give us the same capacity over the rest of the week that we would have had otherwise.
Pretty much what Tom said. We deliverd all Thursday things today except for a few that are for funerals in case that gets postponed. We will try to round up 4 -6 more drivers for Friday in addition to the 6 w had already lined up. But I don't think we'll be able to make up for Thursday completely unless the storm isn't as bad as predicted. Mainly because we accept orders for same day delivery all day on holidays and we probably won't be doing that tomorrow. We will work all day tomorrow and hope for some walk ins while we get everything made that we can. That way I can leave the shop Friday to do some deliveries maybe spare one more from sales. I got local hotel rooms for two of my employees that have long commutes so they can get in easily and everyone else lives reasonably close by. Not expecting to break any records but if we can just get through it in one piece, not lose power, or have anyone else get the flu we might be OK.
dlnfloral
Beaches,Umbrella Drinks and Jimmy Buffett Are Call
Our snow started on Wednesday. Even though we encouraged people to take things early, most didn't want that. We weren't able to get everything delivered we had for Wed, almost nothing on Thursday and only 75 items on Friday. We delivered all day Saturday, half the day Sunday and the remainder on Monday. We lost at least $25,000.00 in business because when the snow started falling, so did the orders. Fortunately we were inundated with funeral work Sunday through Wednesday which helped use a lot of left over product, but our dump sheet will still be huge.
