Saying “I do” to large lawsuits
By Never teh Bride
We all want what we want when we want it, but I think there should be limits. For example, ask yourself what the appropriate level of financial compensation would be if your florist gave you pastel flowers rather than darker colored flowers. If you said $400,000, you have a friend in lawyer Elana Glatt. She’s suing the proverbial pants off of Posy Floral Design in Manhattan, according to the NYT, alleging that her $60,000 wedding was ruined when the florist substituted pastel pink and green hydrangeas for dark rust and green hydrangeas in the centerpieces.
[The florist] said that he and his wife had done their best to match the color of the hydrangeas with a picture Ms. Glatt had given them, but explained to her that because of the vagaries of nature and the lighting at the reception, the colors might not look exactly the same.
Glatt also alleges that the hydrangeas were wilted, brown, and displayed in dusty vases. Well, all right, wilted flowers don’t make for pretty centerpieces, but is that worth $400,000 in damages? The orchids and roses provided by the florist apparently looked cheap, leading to distress and embarrassment. And let’s not forget those irksome pastels!
“The use of predominantly pastel centerpieces had a significant impact on the look of the room and was entirely inconsistent with the vision the plaintiffs had bargained for,” Ms. Glatt, a lawyer who practices under the name Elana Elbogen, said in the lawsuit, which she filed on behalf of herself, her husband and her mother-in-law, Tobi Glatt, who paid for the flowers.
Glatt did request a $4,000 refund to recoup some of the $27,435.14 her MIL spent on the flowers, but the florist, incensed by the request, ignored it.
Your thoughts?
October 16th, 2007 at 12:27 pm
$400,000 in damages seems a little extreme to me. A lot extreme, actually.
That said, the florist would have been smart to refund the $4k the bride originally asked for. If the MOG did in fact spend $27,000 on the flowers, and some of those flowers were wilty, brown and displayed in dusty vases, asking for $4,000 back doesn’t seem that obnoxious.
October 16th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
Wow. With a $60,000 wedding, you’ll note nearly half of that budget went just to flowers!
This boggles my mind a bit.
Still, this is why it’s important to have a clear contract with a clear clause on what will happen if the product fails to meet expectation…and why it’s also very important to do your research so you understand the vagaries of nature and just how much difference the lighting can or cannot make in your floral arrangements.
Is the florist giving the couple a snow job? Is the bride being completely unreasonable? I can’t answer that. All I can really say is I honestly doubt that anyone but the bride noticed any problem.
October 16th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
$27,000 on flowers is just ridiculous, and $400,000 in damages is even more insane. This lawsuit reminds me of the D.C. judge who sued his dry cleaner for over $1 mil for losing his pants (which they actually found).
October 16th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
On the surface, the amount seems pretty extreme. I will say that if half the wedding budget was flowers, it does stand to reason that having the wrong color flowers/lots of wilting/dusty vases would have a major impact on the whole day. If floral arrangements were used as a major part of the landscape, I can see a pretty hefty refund being in order - perhaps even the full amount. Too bad the florist didn’t go with $4000. It looks like multiplying it times one hundred is more of a bid for attention.
Although I don’t agree with it, I know in Florida it’s possible to sue for damages far in excess of the contract if the event was a “lifetime” milestone. Weddings, graduations, baby showers and such are included. I know this because a friend of mine who photographs weddings almost got sued for tens of thousands because she lost one memory card out of 5 she filled up on a job that paid her $500. Logically, she “owes” $100 but in a country where you can sue for emotional distress… She’s lucky they took her apology.
October 16th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Anyone having a 60k wedding and budgeting 27k+ on flowers is not to be taken seriously. florist should pay the 4k and let it go
October 16th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
Molly: Five whole memory cards of photos for $500?! Lordy, that’s a bargain! If I was that bride, I’d probably have just let it go.
October 16th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
Plaintiffs routinely inflate the damages claim by 10 or 100x what they would settle for. It’s just a tactic, and the amount of vitriol this woman has gotten because of that figure has been pretty unfortunate. Yeah, maybe she spent too much on the flowers, but given what the florist told her, she at least has the right not only to contract damages, but possibly to further damages based on fraud. If I bought a car for that amount and I was given a completely different car I couldn’t return, I’d want my money back, and damages for fraud, too.
It’s different from the Judge’s suit because the ALJ harassed them for years and refused to take settlement amounts hundreds of times more than the pants were worth.
Finally, I hate the comments I’ve been seeing elsewhere about how spending this much on flowers is somehow a reflection of poor character. Most weddings are extravagances that can be done for the civil union fee. If you can afford it, there’s nothing wrong with going all out on flowers.
October 17th, 2007 at 11:55 am
But obviously they couldn’t afford it or they wouldn’t need $400,000 so badly!
Just kidding.
October 17th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
Actually, it IS pretty ridiculous, because I learned while doing my wedding that you cannot guarantee hydrangea colors. Of course, her florist should have told her that, but it’s possible that they did. Hydrangeas are not like, say, tulips, that come in definite colors for specific types. Green ones are immature flowers and I think “rust” ones as this bride specified are what happens to pink hydrangeas as they get older. The colors of mature hydrangeas vary wildly from blue to pink to purple, sometimes even on the same plant, depending on the pH of the soil, the amount of light and water they’ve received, and then finally the breed of hydrangea. However, her florist should have made sure that the bride understood that there was a possibility that the correct colors might not be available–I didn’t have a florist contract, I did my own, but I think it’s a standard inclusion in florist contracts. That they’d do their best to provide the flowers as agreed, but it depends on market conditions. If a bride wanted specific flowers and contracted for them in the winter, and in the summer a hurricane killed the entire crop, should the bride be able to sue the florist? No, because there should be a line in the contract.
October 17th, 2007 at 3:31 pm
Hmm…maybe I should have sued my florist, by this lawyer’s standards. She provided hideously arranged flowers that did not match the pictures I provided in even the most remote way - I ended up taking scissors to my bouquet just before rushing to the wedding site. She also didn’t do the corsage-flowers we’d talked about for mothers etc. but went with pinned versions. She was an hour late, the person showed up 10 minutes before my wedding started. And the flowers were all wrong for the cake…totally. It looked like a hippy threw up rather than the daisy heads and green rose petals I had requested be sprinkled around.
I think the only thing she got right were the flower girl petals and the guys’ boutonnieres.
October 17th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
Never teh Bride:
You would think so, but people in this state have a crazy idea of what services are worth. She lost the mother-son dance and some non-memorable parts of the reception, but some of the photos remaining clearly show where she had to elbow her way through relatives to get each and every shot she *did* have. As such, the family’s claim that they have “no photos” of the super important mother-son dance cannot possibly be true unless their entire extended family fell off a cliff on the way home.
October 17th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Well, considering we live in a society where a parent can sue the school and his/her kid’s teacher for not writing a good enough college rec letter, I can’t say I’m too surprised by the bride’s demands. I’m not saying whether or not she is justified, but the amount she is asking for is pretty exorbitant.
October 21st, 2007 at 8:35 pm
I am curious about a few different items about her wedding. 1) How did she feed her guests and have a dress, photographer, cake, music, liquor, etc on the remaining budget???? 2) Hydrangeas are not the red/green color until they are about dead in the FALL… not at the begining of August. 3)Most of the vases could of had water in them when they were delivered… hydrangeas are “Heavy Drinkers” and can down tons of water in a matter of a very short period of time.
If it were me… I would have spray painted green hydrangeas lightly (floral spray). In the future I hope the florist has a “Bridzilla ~ Momzilla and MomInLawzilla provision” in the contract.