A national registry where people could indicate preferences … for florists.
I would love to have the ability to log into a site and tell it that we don’t want any live plants, or cut glass vases, or any of the other silly sh*t that people send instead of a card or a simple phone call.
We have cats. My wife has a black thumb, and I don’t care about plants all that much. To me the perfect house has a well-manicured lawn, a few mature trees, and maybe an evergreen or two for accent — and if there are any plants INSIDE the house, they’re fake. Like the plastic tree we have in the family room, or the ceramic black roses my wife got from someone that are on top of the kitsch cabinet. (OK, fine; we have a philodendron that my wife brought to the marriage that hangs in the front window, and which by all rights ought to have died years ago, but I always manage to see it and remember to water it before it shrivels completely up. My wife won’t have anything to do with it and wants to throw it away.)
So — of course, with my wife recently graduating from her master’s program, we got cut flowers from her parents, and someone else brought us a cute little potted flowering plant (no idea what it is) that I just got done watering. In any other house, you could put these things on side tables or the front hall table or whatever.
In this house, the cats would have them on the floor in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…
So we can’t actually enjoy plants and flowers here. They always have to be displayed on top of some tall piece of furniture so that the cats can’t get to them. Which means we forget about them and they die horrible deaths from lack of water.
A national floral registry that florists could consult when someone tries to send you flowers would be a fab idea. Why can’t some enterprising venture capitalist get on that?