Mad rush for florists on Valentine's Day

WEST SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (WWLP) - All across the country Thursday, people's days were made by the special delivery of Valentine's Day flowers. But there's a whole lot of planning before that arrangement arrives on your desk or doorstep.

Long before love was in the air this Valentine's Day, the folks at Durocher Florist in West Springfield were up and at 'em for the marathon day ahead. By 4AM Thursday they were busy arranging some 6,000 red roses and hundreds of other flowers for Valentine gifts.

“We've bought red roses, this will be our fourth time restocking. We have another 500 coming in shortly just to get through the end of the day and to fill the existing orders we have today,” said owner Peter Soule.

Durocher drivers make between 5 and 600 deliveries to homes and offices on Valentine's Day. But hundreds of other customers stop by the store to pick theirs up, or even to place some very last minute orders. Soule told 22News they estimate how many flowers they need by a few factors: records from past years, which day of the week Valentine's Day falls on, and whether something like school vacation might send people out of town.

On this day of deliveries fortunately the roads are in much better shape than they were after the weekend nor'easter. But still those snow banks will pose some problems for drivers.

“If we need to just pull up and put the flashers on in a breakdown lane or something, but now there are no breakdown lanes left. The snow makes it a little harder but we're in the vans, we're high up so luckily we can see over most of the banks still,” said Dan Soule.

The phone never stops ringing.. and there's a lot of bumping into each other.. but Soule told 22News it's certainly a rewarding day of madness.

“Lots of happy customers. Lots of happy customers.”

Each arrangement takes between 10 minutes and an hour to complete. Soule said they had more long stem red rose orders this year than ever before.