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When I retired I briefly worked delivering for a fairly small local flower shop.

My wife does the flower arrangements at our church. She spends $100-$200/week, more for special occaisons.

Yes, there is plenty of mark-up. However, to run a profitable flower shop, you have to be smart. If you guess wrong on how many you buy, you are stuck with stock that will DIE (canned tuna, sticks around. Even aged electronics can be sold at a mark-down. Dead flowers are a total loss.) If you don't buy enough, you risk losing customers long term to someone with better selection. You even have to compete with Kroger & company for Mother's Day and Valentines Day because they will drive the prices down on flowers for those days by bringing in truckloads of the most popular arrangements, and display them to people already there for groceries. Tough business. The guy getting the vacation in Switzerland earned it.

For mother’s day he ordered a refrigerated tractor trailer full of flowers and had at least 4 times as many people putting the arrangements together as usual.

Oddly enough almost all those people were 20 somethings.

So between the flowers investment and paying all those people, yeah I guess it is a bit of a calculated gamble.

That day he paid me by the delivery.....$12 per....e gave me all the deliveries that were closest to the shop which was really cool of him. I made decent money that day.