Valentines’ Day: True Love or Persuasive Advertising?

Only on Valentine’s Day would cash-broke Cornell students spend their entire weekly living allowance to purchase over priced flowers. Why? Perhaps as a result of passionate intimate feelings only someone experiencing “true love” could understand. Or, said by the heartbroken naïve underclassman whose only companionship is Ben & Jerry’s, “persuasive advertising”. Society has been influenced by movies, commercials, and almost every other form of mass media to believe an illustration of love equates to either chocolate or flowers, sometimes even both.

Bob Sullivan, MSNBC’s detective on internet scams and consumer fraud, wrote a story detailing the outrageous flower prices charged in the days leading up to Valentine’s Day. His findings compared three online flower companies who each advertised the most affordable prices on the internet. FTD.com, Proflowers.com, and 1800Flowers.com sold roses at the price of 38.49, $35.28, and $34.99, respectively.

For the Cornell students who didn’t think to pre-order flowers via the internet, they could still express their love; of course, for an even higher premium. On the small strip of College Avenue, what Cornell students refer to as “Collegetown”, flowers could be purchased virtually anywhere, as seen by the pictures below. The fundamental principles of persuasive advertising force even intelligent Ivy League students to fall victim to flower sales on Valentine’s Day.

Valentine’s Day is advertised as the one day a year to illustrate your love for someone. If you fail to acknowledge how much you love your companion on Valentine’s Day you’ll probably be single very quickly. A student’s (or consumer) demand curve becomes progressively more inelastic because more consumer are in the market, there are essentially no substitutions, and the preference for flowers on Valentine’s Day compared to any other day throughout the year has increased. The result as Sullivan states, “the price of an item (flowers) is routinely more than double the advertised price. Who said love was free?

This blog post was written by Amyn Bandali, Meghan Holleran, Stephanie Menke, and Philip Nachbar