1-800-Flowers

And oftentimes I go into Rakuten and I just put in the exact thing I'm looking for, the Insta360 this or that.

Or another one I do often is for on the wealth management side with my financial planning practice, oftentimes if I need to send something to clients like a gift, whether flowers, whether it's free because of a passing or a celebration or what have you, I often just go to Rakuten and just type flowers because sometimes 1-800-Flowers is doing 15x, but then ProFlowers is doing 20x or some brand I've never heard of is doing 25x or something crazy.

So I do think the ability to just go in and type just flowers as an example could be massively valuable, especially because, as you said, there's 30 shopping portals and obviously 27 of them don't have the highest offer most of the time.

But for the ones that do, understanding where I can perhaps derive more value from or get more value for my purchase that I'm going to be making anyway, I find that massively beneficial and really intriguing and really exciting to see when that rolls out because I do think that's going to help a lot of the shoppers that are like me that they're not thinking about a Nike or Brooks or something specific.

I encourage you where you are to see if this is an option for you.

But I know on platforms like 1-800-Flowers, for example, you can actually schedule ahead flowers.

So I will look at the entire month of November and I might say, OK, you know, so-and-so's birthday is November 10th.

Somebody else's birthday is November 17th.

And somebody else's birthday is November 26th.

I'm going to send a card to this one, flowers to this one, and just a text to this person.

For that flower delivery, I can actually go into 1-800-Flowers today, so October 28th, and schedule it to deliver on that person's birthday.

Now, the only thing I will warn you about that has definitely happened to me more than a few times is because I do this so far in advance.

It reminds me of an anecdote early in my career.

I won't name names, but the customer was 1-800-Flowers, you know, you call for your flowers for your wife or mother, et cetera.

And, you know, our system, our network went down on Mother's Day.

which, as you can imagine, not a good experience.

The new card bonuses I already mentioned, referring new people to the credit cards, shopping portal rewards won't count at all.

The Southwest partners like car rentals, hotels, 1-800-Flowers, none of that stuff is going to count as tier qualifying points in the new program, which A, marks a significant departure from today, and B, distinguishes them quite significantly from competitors like American Airlines and Alaska Atmos, which do offer the ability to earn towards elite status with many of those things.

Really good point there.

Yeah.

So much.

And one of the things that we've learned here at 1-800-Flowers is we've invested a lot on education.

We have created something called Fresh University, and we have guest lecturers and regular programs.

We have workshops.

that's spontaneous and interesting and sometimes uncertain, but definitely gives us a much richer social life when we do it.

I was thinking in the office the other day, George, at 1-800-Flowers, our intern class is just finishing up for the summer.

And you see all these bright young kids and they come up with some great ideas for us.

And of course, we do that because we're looking for that little special something.

Um, and again, any extra points you're getting on categories of spending, if you're getting two points per dollar on dining or three points per dollar on internet or whatever, only one point per dollar is gonna count toward, um, TQPs, which is the Companion Pass.

And they've taken away any points you would get from spending with their partners, sw hotels.com, book- you know, booking car rentals through them, any other kind of bonus point, like buying from 1-800-Flowers or all the different things that you could do.

Um, those...

You can still earn those points, and they...

Um, in, in this office, I w- I wanna demonstrate how, uh, granular we get.

I found a category, um, for, um, 1-800-FLOWERS on the profit and loss statement, and it was a big number.

It was, you know, four or five grand for the year, between four and five grand.

I said, "What's this?" Um, they said, "Oh, well, I give my office manager authority.

You know, if someone's in hardship, we, we send a bouquet.

Uh, you know, some patient experience, in hardship, whatever, uh, we, we send a bouquet of flowers." Um, so, um, then I talked to the office manager.

I said, "H- how do you..." She said, "I just call 1-800-FLOWERS." And I said, um, "Do you know how much that costs?" And she said, "Uh, no, I've never really looked at it." Um, [laughs] it was a, it was $169 bouquet.

Naren, have you ever bought your wife a $169 bouquet?

[laughs]

Uh, one of our board members here at 1-800-Flowers is a, a really bright fellow, and he...

When we were talking about culture one time, he said to me, "When something big happens in the company, e- everyone's gonna look to the leaders, yes," but there's other people who he calls cultural touchstones, whose desk or whose office do four or five people quickly gravitate to.

They may not be in a leadership role, but they've been here for a while, but they're the people who carry the culture closest, and people are gonna look to them for signals as to what's going on.