Revenge merchants gear up with dead roses for jilted lovers on V-Day
Jane Costello

Florida, February 13: A dead rose by any other name might be the perfect Valentine’s Day gift for that special someone you can’t stand.

For the cottage industry of entrepreneurs specialising in the art of retribution, this is peak pain season. Courting the nation’s dumped and distressed, they are busy gathering dead flowers and boxing up fish heads, melted chocolates or stones with curses on them.

Michael Baumgartner, a human-resource consultant from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, operates RevengeUnlimited.com, (www.revengeunlimited.com), a website he started in 1997. It hawks dead roses, fake parking tickets and a variety of products that poke fun at the recipient’s sexual prowess.

In the past week, Baumgartner and his friends have spent 18-hour days boxing up dozens of long-stemmed roses dead, black, wilted or lopped off all of which cost as much as a fresh bouquet. The most expensive arrangement is the $55 box of long-stemmed black roses. RevengeUnlimited sold 230 dozen last Valentine’s Day, and Mr Baumgartner expects the number to exceed 300 this year.

To achieve the desired effect, the Revenge team hoses them down with spray paint, leaving a nasty, powdery residue, ‘‘which is a really nice effect’’, he says.Others in the revenge business are also gearing up for a busy day. Carolyn Claar, owner of Drop Dead Florist in Orlando, Florida, is a former flight attendant who runs the concern out of her home.

Claar has four full-time employees, but she had to hire six teenagers to help her fill the 30 per cent increase in dead-flower bouquet orders she has received during the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day. In a typical month, she has 2,000 roses in stock. Now there are 6,000 piled up in her garage, all in various stages of wilt and decay.

‘‘About 75 per cent of my business the rest of the year is for over-the-hill birthdays,’’ she says. ‘‘Right now, it’s the ticked-off lover.’’

Those who can’t say it with roses do have other options. Payback.com customers (www.payback.com) can send dead fish ($19.99), melted chocolates ($24.99) or ‘‘hygiene help’’ gift packs ($11.99), loaded with mouthwash, deodorant and soap.

Some take a more spiritual approach to payback. ‘‘People have a heightened sensitivity this time of the year,’’ says Samantha Kaye, owner of The Voodoo Boutique, an online and mail-order business based in Albuquerque, NM. Kaye sells a variety of magic-spell kits and voodoo dolls to customers who’d rather not be seen going into a witchcraft store.

The Ultimate Revenge Kit sells for $79.95 and allows customers to name their own curse. It contains a nine-day spell that takes about an hour each day to weave. It also comes with a ‘‘protection ritual’’ for the buyer and some one-on-one counselling from Kaye.

If voodoo just won’t do, Hawaiian Hijinx.com (www.hawaiianhijinx.com) will send out a ‘‘revenge stone’’ that promises to deliver an unusual streak of bad luck to the recipient. Darryl Goudreau, a carpenter from Pahoa, Hawaii, set up the website last February. It’s based upon local lore that says volcano gods will wreak mischief on anyone possessing a volcanic stone removed from the island of Hawaii. Goudreau says business got a hefty boost this year from a disgruntled former consultant for Compaq Computer Corp. who apparently complained bitterly that Compaq’s servers kept crashing.

He began ordering the jinx stonesincluding a 100-pound ‘‘revenge boulder’’ to be sent to a Compaq executive. Goudreau says he built a special crate for the 100-pound rock, and shipped it a few weeks ago at a cost of $130. He expects it to arrive in Houston this week, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

A Compaq spokeswoman says the company hasn’t to her knowledge received any rocks and, if it did, probably wouldn’t deliver them to the executive.

After Goudreau sent out the volcanic boulder, the consultant, who declined to be identified, asked what it would cost to send an 800- to 1,000-pound rock. ‘‘At that point, we’d be getting into trucks, forklifts and cranes,’’ says Goudreau.‘‘I told him, ‘You gotta know when to say when’.’’

Seasoned revenge merchants say it isn’t always easy to turn pain into profit. Baumgartner says revenge from Revenge Unlimited is enough ‘‘to pay the bills and then some’’, but that there’s only so much money to be made from the misery of others.

Still, there are definite perks. Baumgartner plans to spend Valentine’s Day in bed sleeping and he’s sure, as a bulk buyer of roses, he’ll be able to get a good deal on the flowers he’s planning to buy his girlfriend. They will be live, but they won’t be red.

‘‘Red roses mean guilt,’’ he says. ‘‘I go for yellow or pink.’’