Lily Huynh / The Cougar
There is one day each year that makes me question my sanity, a day supposedly dedicated to love. What used to be one of my favorite times of the year is now something I dread. I know the second I clock into my grocery store’s floral department on Feb. 14, I won’t be able to catch a break.
This year, I spent an entire shift inflating heart-shaped balloons, priced from $8.98 to $25.98 each. Each balloon string I tie, I do the math in my head. Why on earth would anyone be buying this right now?
Not to mention, the roses that usually cost $10.98 a dozen get marked up to $15.98 just starting a week before, but it’s fine because it’s Valentine’s Day, or, depending on how you look at it, capitalism’s most efficient love language.
Working behind a floral counter gives you a strange, unfiltered view of romance. I’ve seen the panic buyers, dropping hundreds of dollars on arrangements like it’s nothing. I see the people carefully calculating how much love they can afford. I see the guilt purchases. Once, I had a customer ask for a written apology to the partner they cheated on.
And I started to see how transactional this whole thing is.
Valentine’s Day markets itself as a celebration of love, but from where I stand, it seems like a high-pressure deadline for a big project coming up. Love becomes measurable at this point. Did you buy flowers? How big was the arrangement?
Somewhere along the way, I think we have lost the point of why we celebrate Valentine’s Day. Why must affection be proven with a receipt?
The weirdest part is that people know this: customers watch the prices rise and know they will come down after Valentine’s. Yet they will still buy the flowers, regardless of whether the quality is any different. Nobody wants to be the person who does nothing.
That pressure is where the idea of capitalism thrives. Suddenly, love isn’t just something you feel or express; it’s something you perform, and performance can be sold.
Behind the counter
Working retail during Valentine’s season makes this painfully obvious. The floral department is rearranged weeks in advance, pushing red and pink to every aisle. The environment itself seems to be pushing people toward spending before they have even decided what they want, and it works.
I have watched customers look at overpriced chocolate or flowers, hesitate then buy it anyway because it’s Valentine’s Day. That phrase becomes a justification, a loophole that makes irrational spending romantic instead of impulsive. The holiday doesn’t encourage overspending; it excuses it.
For people my age, especially students juggling rent, tuition and groceries, the pressure hits differently. Do you buy her flowers or gas? A nice dinner reservation or next week’s groceries? The symbolism is the same.
And yet, opting out of Valentine’s Day feels risky. There’s an unspoken rule: not participating, or participating “too little,” can be read as indifference. Sometimes people spend money not because they want to, but because they fear what it might mean if they don’t.
This is what makes Valentine’s Day feel less like a celebration.
Of course, the gifts themselves aren’t the problem. Gifting someone flowers is meaningful. The issue is the expectation that love has to be visible, purchasable and delivered on a single date.
Because, honestly, the most genuine moments of love rarely happen under fluorescent grocery-store lights. They happen quietly, in late-night conversations, the small acts no one else sees.
Ironically, those are the moments I think about while tying balloon strings and restocking the rose table. The contrast is impossible to ignore. On one side, love is packaged in plastic. On the other hand, love exists without needing proof.
Maybe that is why working Valentine’s Day changed how I see it. It didn’t make me more cynical about romance, but it definitely made me more skeptical about how we’re told to show it.
The honest takeaway from the floral counter is that love was never meant to feel like a timed purchase. Love doesn’t live in balloons or roses.
The real challenge isn’t trying to find the perfect Valentine’s Day present; it is remembering that the most meaningful expressions of love were never meant to come with a price tag.
opinion@thedailycougar.com
