Proper delivery a key for a successful Valentine's Day

Today is Valentine's day and all across the country, men and women are surprising their loved ones with romantic gifts delivered to the office. Some people take pride in making all of their co-workers jealous with the perfect gift delivered at the perfect time. However, all of this depends on a timely delivery.

If a bouquet of flowers arrives a day early, it can be played off as a sweet surprise, but if that is a day late, it can make for a very uncomfortable day of love. Because of this, having a reliable way to get those flowers onto a significant other's desk becomes critical.

A recent article from Fusion examined the journey that flowers take to fulfill the demand for Valentine's day. According to the piece, 3,000 tons of flowers will be delivered to Miami's International Airport, having been sent from areas like Colombia and Ecuador.

The entire process takes five to eight days. First flowers are cut, packed in boxes and shipped to Miami.There they are stored in coolers and passed through customs inspection. At that point they are picked up by their various distributors and stored in a warehourse kept at 36 degrees F to keep them fresh.

At this point, workers start processing the individual orders, getting them ready to be packed into trucks along with the other parts of the order — vases, chocolate, cards, teddy bears — and get them loaded for overnight delivery so they are in the hands of loved ones Valentine's Day.

Drones grounded again, this time from delivering flowers

Unsurprisingly, the Amazon announcements of drone delivery got another organization thinking they should give it a try. Last week, we profiled a Wisconsin Beer delivery service that was planning on shipping beer to fisherman over the frozen lakes until the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) shut them down.

This week, an article from CBS Detroit covered FlowerDeliveryExpress.com, a floral delivery company in Commerce Township that has been experimenting with drone delivery of flowers on Valentine's day.

"Cupid's wings have been clipped," company CEO Wesley Berry told the news source. "The FAA was extremely professional and polite. I couldn't have been chastised in a nicer way."

He went on to say that the reason for the grounding is that drones are not approved for commercial use except for pre-authorized, case-by-case basis. He was also not provided with a timeline of when potential regulations that would allow drone delivery. However, they did tell him that the organization is "actively working on it."

"This technology is here to stay," Berry said. "When the time is right, we'll be ready for orders to be delivered, not by an address, but by GPS coordinates. It's exciting to plan the future of the business based on this emerging technology."

The company had launched the consumer beta program to test alternative forms of delivery. A volunteer group was selected from a pool of applicants and deliveries were made on February 8, 2014. The FAA has shut down a larger deployment that was planned for Valentine's Day.

Having proper shipping in place on Valentine's Day is critical for ensuring every customer has their flowers, gifts and cards delivered on time.