SPOILER ALERT: Things didn’t go as planned.
As an extremely frugal person, I spent the months leading up to our wedding researching ways we could save the most money — particularly on details that I didn’t care too much about … like flowers.
I am not a huge flower person, and I refused to spend several hundred dollars on blooms for our big day that would die. While I think real flowers are a waste of money, I also don’t like the way fake flowers look for a wedding look.
Now you see my dilemma.
In doing research, I found several blogs with tips on buying flowers wholesale from stores like Sam’s Club or Costco and creating all the centerpieces, bouquets, and boutonnieres yourself. Hell, even the reviews on the Sam’s Club website were full of women who DIY’d their wedding flowers.
They all made it seem easy enough, so that’s what I decided we (I) would do.
About three weeks before the big day I placed my flower order: 10 bunches of baby’s breath, 36 stems of garden roses, 30 stems of hydrangeas, and 8 bunches of assorted greenery.
As suggested by Sam’s Club and all the blogs I read, I scheduled the flower delivery for the Thursday before our Saturday wedding.
Flash forward to that Thursday and first thing in the morning our greenery arrived. It was a beautiful mixture of eucalyptus, tall grasses, and other green pieces I can’t name at this point.
Right then, in that moment, I wasn’t at all alarmed that we had only received ONE of the four items I ordered.
Even though I specifically designated Thursday for putting together centerpieces and my bouquet, I was actually very calm as the hours ticked by that day and I still had not even received a shipping notice for the rest of my flower order.
Then, at around 5 p.m. the switch flipped and panic set in.
Where the F were my flowers?
I asked my husband-to-be to call Sam’s Club customer service to try and get some answers. He is much calmer dealing with other people in these situations.
He sat on hold for one hour before someone came on the line. As he explained our situation to the customer service representative and asked her if she could provide an update on the status of our order, she thought it to be a better use of her time to tell the person in the room with her how to treat her child’s diarrhea.
You can’t make this shit up (pun intended).
When she came back on the line she said, “Yeah, so, what was your problem?”
And when Justin retold her that we were missing flowers for our Saturday wedding and needed a status update for the order, the line conveniently cut out. Or she hung up.
If I were a betting woman, my money would be on the latter.
Justin promptly redialed the Sam’s Club customer service number and got a new representative who was just as incompetent and unhelpful as the first.
We hung up the phone on her when she said, “Oh man that really sucks” and “Sorry, I don’t think I can do anything” in the most apathetic voice a person could muster.
You DON’T THINK you can do anything or you WON’T do anything?
I imagine that I will forever harbor ill feelings for this person and her lack of basic human decency in that moment of panic.
That’s when we took it to Twitter.
Honestly, we should have started there. It’s 2017, if you want something done, you have to put a major corporation on blast on social media.
Justin tweeted at Sam’s Club first and informed them of our extremely poor customer service experience.
And I followed up with “@SamsClub just single-handedly ruined my wedding.”
It was not my proudest moment and perhaps was dramatic, but have you met me?
Bless whoever was managing the Sam’s Club Twitter account that night because they direct messaged Justin immediately asking for the details of what happened and our order number.
Within 30 minutes of us messaging back-and-forth on Twitter with this person, we had a shipping notice and tracking number for our remaining flowers.
How is it that two customer service representatives could not provide us any answers, but the social media person was able to get us shipping information in minutes?
The next morning I could have kissed the FedEx driver when he pulled up in front of our house.
My bridesmaids spent the entire day before my wedding putting together all of my centerpieces, bouquets, and boutonnieres while I took decorations to the venue and attempted to start decorating.
This should have been an easy and enjoyable day for all of us, but instead it was the most stressful.
I was so overwhelmed with the late arrival of the flowers and the amount of stuff that still needed to be done at the venue that I just broke down and cried. Right there on the porch of our venue, with my head in my hands, is where Justin found me.
All I could think about was everything that still needed to be done and the fact that I STILL had to go home and get ready for our rehearsal.
Because the flowers arrived late and set everything else off schedule, I honestly could not enjoy a single moment of my rehearsal, the rehearsal dinner, or the night before my wedding.
I don’t even have a picture of Justin and me at our rehearsal or dinner because I was so upset and couldn’t relax enough to think to take one.
Thanks to my amazing bridesmaids, my flowers got done and they turned out beautiful. But if I could do it over again, I would just shell out the extra cash and have a florist do them.
The money I saved by ordering wholesale was not worth the amount of stress it put on everyone involved.
My suggestion to any bride who is considering DIY-ing her flowers: Don’t do it. Or, if you do, have a solid backup plan. Even though I scheduled my flowers to arrive on a certain day, I actually had no control over whether or not they showed up on that day. When I realized they weren’t coming when they were supposed to, that was the most helpless feeling.
Trust me, you don’t want to be scrambling the day before your wedding to put hydrangeas in vases or wrapping rose stems with floral tape.
Photography: Alisha Rudd Photography /// Dress: Casablanca Bridal purchased at Mecklenburg Bridal Gallery /// Hair and Makeup: Lindsey Mount /// Venue: Historic Beaver Dam, Davidson, NC.
[…] wedding and nothing was going the way it was supposed to. Our flowers didn’t arrive on time {you can read about that here}, our venue wasn’t decorated, and I was late to my own rehearsal because I had an actual […]