I think this is an awesome choice of gift! That is exactly what I want my sweetie to do–think about what he knows about me and buy me something that’s a bit of a luxury that fits with what I want/need. Plus, it will be a reminder throughout the year!
I have given and received from Harry & David before, with good results. I only have personal experience with oranges & grapefruit, but they were amazing. The grapefruit were peel & eat good! I think with the clubs they have enough experience to know what is a good fruit to use for each month, so can reliably provide what is at its peak at that time.
Ah, now a beef club – that should be her gift to me! Yay, cow! I wonder how I might surreptitiously suggest it. Dammit…now I want a T-bone…
snort Exactly. No offense taken, anyone.
Thanks for the vote of confidence. I wonder: does citrus just ship better than other fruit? That would explain the kiwi complaint in Athena’s cite. Makes me very wary about some of the other shipments; I’d think strawberries and papayas might not hold up well either. Which makes Hale’s a little more attractive, as that’s their specialty (whereas Harry and David’s seems to be pears).
I wouldn’t worry about the Raymond references. The Fruit-of-the-Month thing happened in the very first episode, back when it was mildly amusing and before the series had a chance to really suck.
God, I am so surprised by the negative review of Harry & David. We have been getting boxes every month for over five years and only once did we get a sub-par box, and that was because it was delivered while we were on vacation! They graciously sent another, and reminded us that if we knew we would be away, to call them and they would reschedule the delivery for when we would be home!
Are there any CSAs in your neck of the woods? You could send your wife lovely fresh organic produce and also support local sustainable farmers at the same time, instead of some faceless mega-fruit corporation like Harry and David.
You’re basically “subscribing” to the harvest of a local organic farm, making a commitment to buy some of their produce at a fixed price. A longer description is here:
I thought about local growers, but two things: I didn’t know where to look and I figured that someplace like Hale’s wasn’t really a “mega-fruit corporation” (I’m not sure if Harry and David qualifies either in my mind). I’m not too concerned with the latter, as it looks like most places are fairly small businesses or middle-men; as to the former, thanks for the link, I’ll look into it.
The gist of the CI story was that they were comparing the fruit baskets from various companies to the fruit available at their local grocery stores, both quality-wise and price-wise. A lot of the negatives were about price (although not all - as I quoted above, they weren’t happy about the quality of every piece of fruit from Harry & David.)
In general, they deemed the replacement values - ie, the cost to replace the fruit with similiar-quality fruit at their local groceries - at between $10 and $15, with the only exception on particularly large basket of not-very-exciting fruit.
The cost of the baskets ranged between $57 and $75, with most falling around $65.
~$65 for ~$10 worth of fruit was the overall gist of things.
