For most of us the next few months involve a lot of gift giving.

One great gift, especially when you really aren't sure what someone might want, is flowers. Almost everyone loves getting flowers, they are given much less frequently (and appreciated much more) than alcohol, and they're never offensive or inappropriate. Flowers really are the perfect gift for almost anyone – friends, colleagues, clients and co-workers .

They are certainly ideal when you attend a dinner or house party and you ask yourself, or the host, "what should I bring?". Bring flowers. In situations like these the best thing to do is send them over a day early, or earlier in the day, so that the host has time to include them when setting the table or decorating the house.

This means calling a florist, or visiting their website, and placing an order. This seems simple, and it should be, but people called order-gatherers try and make it harder.

They masquerade as real local florists. They'll take out fake listings in the phone books and fake ads in the yellow pages of countless towns, all designed to convince you that they are genuine local flower shops when in act they are just a call center hundreds if not thousands of miles away.

Same thing on the web – they will run multiple websites, again optimized to appear like local flower shops wherever you are sending. And online and on the web they will frequently use the name and sometimes even addresses of established local flower shops.

All this to convince you to place your flower order with them – an order they have no way of filling themselves. Why?

Because they will then try and trick a real local florist into delivering it for them for a lot less money. The service charge and part of the delivery fee that you paid? They usually just keep that outright – they don't even mention it to the florist that actually prepares and delivers your flowers.

What about the money you paid for the product? They'll usually mislead the filling florist about that too – their goal is to spend as little as possible as long as they can get something that kind of resembles what it is that you really paid for.

Real florists are great people and they will always do their best on every single piece but these order-gatherers really make it hard. You order a $100 piece and expect good value, but the order gatherer hires the real florist to make something for $60.

When you order flowers – and you should – make sure that you deal with a real local florist. For more details on how to do that check out this article on the best way to buy flowers on the Bring Flowers website.

There is an interesting article on CareerCloud about job interviews that did not take place in a traditional office. It features five stories of different interview scenarios, none of which involve an office.

With more people telecommuting in-office interviews are no longer always possible. It is fascinating to see how some employers are embracing the challenge and coming up with ways to learn more about a prospective hire than they ever could in an office.

Some new content was added to the pricing resources section of the Beyond Cost Plus site that covers two very important pricing concepts:

Anchor Pricing
The idea here is that introducing an anchor price early on can make subsequent prices look much better in comparison. Think about the price tag you see on a sale item. The larger undercounted price is almost always prominently displayed because it acts as an actor that makes the smaller discounted price seem much more attractive.

The new content includes both a definitions and some real world example of anchor prices are used to establish value.

Decoy Pricing
The concept of decoy pricing draws on the asymmetric dominance effect – the idea is that if one option completely dominates another it becomes much more attractive. Decoy prices are introduced to do just that – be completely inferior to another specific option in all possible aspects – making that option much more attractive to the consumer (and steering them towards the option that the vendor had in mind).

Decoy prices were covered beautifully in the bool Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. The new content includes his famous example (from The Economist magazine) as well as a few others. One looks at subscription plans for the New York Post while another looks at how decoy pricing was used on an Indiegogo campaign.