Romance on a budget

What's the story with value on St Valentine's day asks Conor Pope

If you’re going to follow the traditional love parade this year you won’t have any change out of €300 by the time midnight on February 14th comes round. A dozen red roses will cost in the region of €100 – upwards of €150 in some florists. A card will set you back a fiver and a bottle of champagne is another €40. Then there’s the “romantic” candlelit dinner, for which you’ll be shoe-horned into a restaurant and served the “special menu” (the only special thing about it is the price), and the taxi home.

Prices are, however, falling and there are alternatives in these cash-strapped times. Lidl and Aldi are leading from the front; both supermarkets are selling cut-price chocolates, cheap champagne and good-quality roses for a third of the price they are selling for in the nation’s florists.

Lidl is flogging its JD Gross Praline Chocolates for €2.99 (we’ve tried them and while they’re okay, we’re not sure how the presentaion of a €3 box of Gross chocolates from Lidl would go down in the Pricewatch household on Valentine’s morning. Actually, we are: badly). More appealing is the pink Champagne for €29.99 and the dozen Grand Prix roses which the store is selling for €34.99.

For its part, Aldi’s Grand Prix Rose bouquet is even better value at €29.99 and we are assured the flowers will be delivered “fresh in store” on Thursday, Friday and Saturday of this week. Its pink champagne is selling for €24.99 a bottle, while its more upmarket chocolate offering features “Specially Selected Irish Handcrafted Chocolates” for €8.99 a box.

BY ANY DEFINITION, these are remarkable prices for the Grand Prix roses, which are regarded by many experts as the finest roses on the market. Typically, the price of a dozen such flowers, which cost €85 in many florists today, will cost closer to €120 next Saturday; when we asked Aldi and Lidl were the prices fixed right up until next Saturday, we were assured they were.

There might be a catch, however: supplies are sure to be limited and unless you’re at the doors of one of the stores as they open on the days in question you could end up disappointed and looking for petrol station forecourt flowers for your Valentine.

The safer, but pricier option are the florists, who will be run off their feet this week. While they get a lot of flak for increasing prices as the 14th comes closer, they are not really to blame. A massive spike in demand on world markets sees every link in the international flower chain increasing its prices this week. Growers have to hire and pay extra staff, freight companies pay premiums while florists pay overtime to staff to cater for demand. While a normal-sized flower shop can expect to shift a couple of hundred roses on a normal day, that number rises closer to 5,000 on February 14th.

Maurice Wynn of madflowers.com says that because of changing times, he has kept his prices low this year; a bouquet of long-stem Grand Prix roses are going for €85 – €40 less than last year.

“I’ve been round long enough to remember past recessions and what tends to happen is that business holds up. If a man can’t buy his wife a new car or whisk her off to somewhere romantic he can afford to buy her a big bunch of flowers instead. When things are tight, flowers really are the cheapest option.”

Conor McCarthy is another florist using a website, www.preciouspetals.ie, to drum up business. He is confident he is offering some of the best-value Valentine’s bouquets on the market and is taking Valentine’s orders for a dozen Naomi roses intertwined with six Calla Lilies for €99. He says the Naomi roses “might be more delicate [than the Grand Prix], but have a bigger head and make a bigger immediate impact”.

HE IS OPTIMISTIC the recession will have “a limited effect” on his business and says that his Valentine’s bookings have so far been brisk. “In good times and in bad times people will buy flowers,” he says. “I don’t think the prices are a rip-off, especially now when there isn’t much cheer about. I think getting flowers is nice for someone and it certainly does brighten their day.” He says that florists don’t really clean up on the big day. “You don’t actually make that much and you really need to be selling big volumes. Half the florists I speak to wish it never came along. It can be absolute chaos and you can be better off with your bread and butter business,” he says.

Irish restaurants will be offering fancier fare than bread and butter next Saturday, although it is hard to escape the notion that they could get away with serving nothing more, such is the demand for restaurant tables. One restaurant owner Pricewatch spoke to recently said that last year, on February 14th, they continued their year-round policy of not taking bookings and “completely tanked”. The restaurant experienced its worst night of the year. “No-one came in as most of the people eating out on that night are couples and they insist on having their reservations made in advance,” the owner said. This year he has decided to take bookings and, with a week to go before Valentine’s Day, is booked solid, as are the dozen or so Dublin city centre restaurants we contacted last week.

Cards are becoming less popular; according to a survey by market analysts Mintel last year, Valentine’s Day is now only the sixth most popular card-sending occasion, having been overtaken by Father’s Day in recent years.

While Adrienne Curry, the head buyer with Irish-owned card shop Swalk, where Valentine’s Day cards sell for between €2.50 and €11, accepts that the day doesn’t have the “oomph” it had a decade ago , it is “still a big deal”, even if e-mail and texting has stolen some of its thunder.

She says that in the midst of a recession “people might be thinking this is one area where we don’t have to splash out but I hope there is still an amount of frivolity out there. We are hoping that there will be a bit of buzz, a bit of excitement. I’m not saying it is going to be the same as last year but I am still hoping that there will be a bit of love in the air over the next week.”

Curry warns that “men would be shot if they just bought a card – they have to buy a present too”. She’s probably right, which is why, in the US alone, more than 36 million heart-shaped boxes of chocolates will be sold and more than $2.5 billion (€1.9bn) worth of St Valentine’s Day-related jewellery is likely to change hands, according to the Society of American Florists. It also found that close to 200 million roses will be delivered, with the vast, vast majority of them being bought by men.