Free Shipping Isn’t Free

Nobody Wants to Hear This, But: Free Shipping Isn’t Free

I’ve been chewing on this one for a few months, which in my case means I’ve written it in my head about forty times while driving, traipsing through airports, and even in the shower. So here it is, finally on paper. For better or worse — but at least it’s out of my head.

We’re running aLabor Day salethis week. And it’s small. Especially considering every time I open my promotions folder, I see 30%, 40%, and now even 50% (?!) off sitting in there from so many other companies. So, naturally, I want to tell you why — not defensively, not as a sad-violin small-business sob story, but because I think the whole conversation about sales and shipping and what things cost has gotten a little disconnected from reality lately, and I’d rather be the person who explains it than the person who quietly plays along. Not because I’m a contrarian, or an “I’m always right” type of person — I’m not. But I am someone who loves to keep learning, and I didn’t know any of this before starting a company, so I want to share my learnings with any of you who also consider yourselves lifelong learners.

Most sales were never sales

Here’s the thing almost nobody says about retail: the discount is usually planned before the product ever exists. There are a bunch of laws that try to make that not legal, but I’m not sure politicians who pass laws really understand how unit economics have to work in order for businesses to stay in business. But that’s a blog for another day, which could easily turn into a very long book.

If you know a thing will be marked 40% off in six weeks, you don’t price it at what it’s worth. You price it at what it’s worth plus the discount you already know you’re going to have to give. The markdown isn’t generosity. It’s a scheduled event that was baked into the sticker on day one. Filene’s Basement used to be refreshingly honest about this — they ran a published markdown calendar, a set percentage off after so many days on the floor, more after that, until whatever was left got donated. Everyone knew the rules. That’s how it worked. Until it didn’t — though I doubt the markdown calendar is what got them.

Most retail still runs that same playbook. It just stopped publishing the calendar.

I’ve never been able to do it that way, and not because I’m nobler than anyone. It’s because we’re bootstrapped. There’s no investor money behind us absorbing the difference between what a bouquet costs to make and what we sold it for. When we sell something at a loss, the loss is the whole thing. It doesn’t get made up in a fundraise. It gets made up by not doing something else — not hiring, not building, not paying someone what I need to pay them.

So when I price a bouquet, that’s the price. Which means when we discount, we’re discounting from an honest number, and there is only so far down an honest number can go before it stops being a business that can survive.

You cannot have a dollar menu and a livable wage

This is the contradiction I can’t stop turning over.

Almost everyone I know — genuinely, across every possible political stripe — believes people who work full time should be able to afford to live. I believe it. I’d guess you believe it. Washington’s minimum wage is $17.13 an hour this year, the highest of any state in the country. Work that full time, every week, all year, and it comes to about $35,600 before taxes. I don’t think that number is too high. I think it’s the minimum of roughly what it takes.

And yet most of those same people, myself absolutely included, would also like the cheeseburger to cost a dollar.

Both of those are good, human wishes. They cannot both be true at the same time. A dollar menu is a wage decision wearing a food costume. Free shipping is a wage decision wearing a logistics costume. Somewhere behind every price that feels too good, someone is being paid too little, or a company is losing money it will eventually have to stop losing, or a corner is being cut in a place you can’t see from the checkout page. That’s not cynicism. That’s just math, plain and simple.

And the hourly floor is only half of it. Most of the people who work here are salaried, and there’s a separate bar for that: in Washington, a salaried role has to pay at least $80,168 a year before you’re allowed to treat it as exempt from overtime. The federal threshold for the very same thing is $35,568 — which, I’ll note, is almost exactly one year of Washington minimum wage. This state asks for more than double what the federal government does before it will let you call someone a salaried professional.

I want people paid well. I also think this particular number is quietly doing something the state probably didn’t intend. I’ve lost count of the small business owners I’ve talked to who have simply stopped creating salaried roles — not because they’re trying to game anything, but because they can’t get to $80,168 for a job the market genuinely prices lower, so the role becomes hourly instead. The person who would have had a salary and a title and a path gets a time clock. I don’t think that’s what anyone was going for. That’s not a study, to be clear — it’s just what I’ve heard from people running companies my size. Either way, it’s a real number, and it sits under every single thing we sell.

We all somehow agreed, sometime around 2015, that shipping should be free. Not cheap — free. A word we use for almost nothing else in the economy. Nobody expects free flowers. But a box, flying across the country overnight, touched by dozens of people, arriving in under twenty-four hours, with something alive inside it? Somehow, we think that should be free.

I understand how we got here. Companies with very deep pockets taught a whole generation of shoppers that shipping is a rounding error, and it worked, and now it’s the water we all swim in. But it isn’t a rounding error. For us, shipping is one of the single largest line items in the entire business — bigger than most people would ever guess, and right now bigger than the cost of the flowers themselves. Wild, isn’t it?

What actually went up this year

I want to be specific, because vague statements about “rising costs” are how companies say nothing while sounding like they’ve said something. And, of course, I can’t seem to say anything without saying a lot of things, so that’s what I’m doing here.

In the first seven months of this year, we spent almost $1.5 million more on shipping than we did in the same seven months last year. Most of that increase was fuel surcharges. And here’s the part that still makes me put my head on the desk: we spent it while shipping fewer packages, over shorter distances. Fewer boxes. Less mileage. Almost a million and a half dollars more.

That’s not the only line that moved:

Labor — up, given the increase in minimum wages and salary thresholds.

Flowers — up, in large part because our growers are paying the same fuel and the same wages we are. Costs roll downhill to the person holding the last box.

Corrugate — the humble cardboard box. Up double digits. Nobody writes think pieces about the price of cardboard, but we live in it.

Insurance — up (of course).

Legal — way up.

Basically everything with an invoice attached to it — up, and not by three or four percent. Often by double digits.

Meanwhile the expectation on the other side of the screen has moved exactly the opposite direction. More discount. Faster delivery. Free shipping. It’s the widest gap I’ve seen in almost sixteen years of doing this, and I’ve been through the end of a recession and a global pandemic during that time.

So, our very small sale

We’re running one. It’s real, it’s for Labor Day, and it is not going to win any inbox competitions this weekend. It’s the size it can be while every person here still gets paid properly and the company still ends the day in the black, or as close to it as we can be.

We could go bigger. We could take the number down to something that would make you gasp and take a screenshot and send to your friends, and we’d have a very good weekend and a genuinely horrible quarter, and then in November I’d be having a much harder conversation with my team than this one. Sixteen years of being the only bootstrapped company in this category has taught me exactly one durable lesson: the businesses that survive are the ones that refuse to buy revenue they can’t afford. And the goal I’d like to achieve is to never have to lay off team members again. It hurts, all the way around.

So it’s a modest sale from a company that would rather tell you the truth than perform a bargain.

The favor I’d like to ask

Here’s my real ask, and it has nothing to do with our sale.

The next time something is 60% off, or shipping is free, or a price makes you tilt your head — don’t feel guilty, and please don’t stop buying it. Just ask the question. Who paid for this? Somebody did. It might be a farmworker. It might be a driver. It might be a company burning investor money on its way to a much worse version of itself (which then leads to layoffs that hurt a lot of people). It might be the quality of the thing itself, quietly hollowed out where you won’t notice until you open the box.

I’d love it if the percentage off stopped being the headline. If the questions were: Is this good? Did it come from somewhere I feel okay about? Is the price fair for what I received? Were the people who made it treated like people?

Those are harder questions than “how much off.” They’re also the only ones that have ever made me happy with a purchase six months later.

Our flowers will never be the cheapest thing in your inbox. I’ve made my peace with that. What I can promise is that the price on our site is the actual price, that the sale is an actual sale, and that every person who touched your bouquet was paid like their work mattered — because it does.

Thanks for reading all of this. See? Still can’t write anything short. ;)

xx,

Christina

SHOP OUR LABOR DAY SALE

FAQs About Why Free Shipping Isn’t Free

Why is flower delivery so expensive?

Flower delivery is expensive because fresh flowers are perishable and for the most part must ship overnight in temperature-controlled packaging. The cost isn’t the flowers alone — it’s overnight freight, fuel surcharges, cold-chain handling, corrugate, and the labor to design and pack each order. For many orders, shipping now costs more than the flowers inside the box.

Is free shipping really free?

No. Free shipping is a pricing decision, not a gift. The cost is either built into the product price, absorbed as a loss by a company that can afford to lose it, or covered by paying someone less somewhere in the supply chain. Somebody always pays for the box.

Why don’t you run bigger sales?

We’re bootstrapped, so every discount comes out of real margin rather than investor funding. We price bouquets at what they actually cost to make and deliver, which means the room to mark down is genuinely limited.

What is a fuel surcharge?

A fuel surcharge is an additional percentage carriers add to shipping charges, adjusted regularly based on national fuel prices. It’s applied on top of whatever rate you’ve already negotiated, and it can change with little warning — which means shipping costs can rise even when a company ships fewer packages over shorter distances.