Valentine's Day - the spending stats:
Cards
- Around one billion cards are exchanged globally on February 14th, making it the second largest card-sending day of the year. An Post expects to handle about 100,000 Valentine cards this year; it’s lot more when St Valentine’s Day falls on a weekday.
Flowers
- Grand Prix roses are the Rolls Royce of the rose market and by far the biggest Valentine sellers. A dozen long-stemmed roses can cost upwards of €80 at the best of times, but the price spikes on Valentine’s Day. You will pay around 20 per cent more on February 14th compared with February 17th.
- While they get a lot of flak for increasing prices, Irish florists are neither alone nor really to blame. African growers have to hire and pay extra staff, freight companies pay premiums, and florists pay overtime to staff. While a normal-sized flower shop can expect to shift a couple of hundred roses on a normal day, that number rises closer to 5,000 on February 14th.
- And where do our roses come from? Well they’re not grown in Ireland, that’s for sure. There’s a good chance the roses you wake up smelling on Saturday morning will have come from Kenya via Amsterdam.
- You can get a cheap bottle of cava and some freshly squeezed orange juice and add in a dozen roses from Aldi at €7.99, and you’re good to go for less than €30 all in.
Restaurants
- Research from the UK suggests that average restaurant prices increase by 35pc on Valentine’s Day, and there is no reason to believe things are much different here. To be fair to restaurants, they have had a very lean January and it is not like they have forced people through their doors with a cattle-prod.
- 49 per cent of Irish people plan to have a home-cooked meal with their significant other on Saturday. Just over a quarter of those surveyed fessed up that they did not plan to actually cook, and would instead rely on the special meal deals from supermarkets such as M&S and Tesco.
Men V Women – attitudes to Valentine's day
- Eight out of 10 women feel Irish men are less romantic than their foreign counterparts, according to a survey carried out for RecruitIreland.
- Men spend more on Valentine's Day gifts, too - 38% of them spend more than €40 on a present for their paramour - while 23% of women do. And almost one in ten splash out more than €100 - compared to just 3% of women.
- But 24% of us have forgotten to get anything at all – and yes, men are 8% more likely to have it slip their mind. But it turns out that might not matter after all.
- Because whether you’re a guy or a gal, there’s no disagreement on the most important gift - half of us really believe that a bit of tender loving care is the best thing we can give our other half on February 14.
- One in five ladies would like flowers (up from 16% last year), while other staples like chocolates (2%), champagne (4%) and even jewellery (7%) get a poor reception.
