Solve It 7: Wake flowers

When Mandy Molloy’s mother passed away unexpectedly this past fall, her world was turned upside down.

“I was just going through the motions,” Mandy explained.

Mandy had to plan her mother’s funeral, and wanted to make sure it was done right.

“We were worried about the flowers because it is part of a proper burial,” she went on. “I mean it only happens once.”

In an effort to support a local business, Mandy and her fiancé decided to order the flowers from Stobbarts Nursery, a flower shop in Franklin.

Mandy described the arrangement they were expecting to receive .

“Two arrangements and a wreath and we said we wanted it to be full, we wanted orchids, purples, and whites,” she said. “Purple was her favorite color.”

“Orchids were one of her favorite flowers,” she said. “We told them the time and they guaranteed that they would be there.”

With that assurance, Mandy figured that everything was set.

But when she arrived at the funeral home the day of the service there was a problem.

“There were no flowers,” Mandy said. “We gave them a couple minutes, thinking they would show up. So ten minutes went by and there were still no flowers”

Mandy called the funeral director who assured them that he would handle the problem, but when the flowers arrived, there was only a few minutes left in the service.

The flowers, Mandy explained, looked nothing like what they had asked for.

“They looked like they were just thrown together. They were not full, they did not look anything like what we were guaranteed they would be.”

Mandy told us the steps that she took in order to try and resolve the problem with the flower shop in the days following the funeral, say that she called daily, sometimes twice a day always getting nowhere.

“I was getting the same person, same response, ‘My manager will be in any minute, I will have her call you,’ and no calls back,” she said.

Eventually, Mandy was offered store credit for one of the arrangements, but she felt that it was not enough.

“My mom did not get the proper burial because they were not there,” she said.

“I felt like I deserve an apology some or at least half of my money back.”

So she contacted Solve It 7.

We called the nursery’s owner, Wayne Stobbart, and talked to him about Mandy’s problem.

He wanted to help.

“She can’t return a perishable product and I can’t go back and change what happened,” Wayne explained.

“We try to do the best we can and if something falls into the crack, we try to make it right.”

Wayne wrote Mandy a check for $138 – half the money she originally paid for the flowers.

At this solution, Mandy said, “Thank you so much because I would not have been able to do it without you. I am very grateful that I am able to come to closure with the whole situation.”

Trending