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Show )•w.~..,.... --wll!:ii:lilill:l;idl..lllllq>J111i•m FOCUS! VALENTINE'S DAY:::::: Love Bytes: Even Valentine's Day Is Becoming High-Tech On-line love notes, ordering roses via PC - how to say 'I love you' in the '90s By JOYCE M . ROSENBERG ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER C hocolates and roses still are the stuff of Valentine's Day, but crooning computer chips, intima te e-m ails and other technological em bellishments are becoming a big part of thi s most romantic h oliday. lf you want to send a bouquet to your honey, you can do it on -li ne. If teddy bears are more your taste, you can get one that tells your sweetie "I love you " in your own voice. Even wi th such innova tions, Valentine's Day still is a day of traditions, including the frantic rush by mostly male hoppers who descend on card and ca ndy stor at the las t m inute. Really high-tech Valentine shopping is done via PC an d modem. Services including Am erica Online, Prodigy an d Com puserve offer customers a chance to order merchand ise through their computers. Spiegel, J.C. Penney, Lands' End, The Sharper Image, The Vermont Teddy Bear Co., Th e Nature Co., 1-800-Flowers and PC Flowers are among the retailers with products available through on-line services. The on-line companies peddle Valentine services of their own. America Online is offering advice on choosing wine, rot_n antic movies and intimate getaways, spokeswoman Margaret Ryan said. Prodigy sells love poems, including Shakespearean sonnets and verse by Robert Browning, and ways to meet your lover on-line, said spokeswoman Carol Wallace. The companies offer Valentine's Day programs, including on-line conversations with authors who have written about finding the perfect mate. They also provide special "bulletin boards," where the computer literate can leave messages for their sweethearts. For the less technologically oriented, there's ordering over the phone from catalogs and other mailorder merchants. Valentine's Day is prime time for gift services like 1-800-Flowers and 1-800-Giftline, which assemble special packages for the holiday. More traditional retailers - . the kind where you actually have to go into a store and physically buy something - expect strong business of jewelry, lingerie and other Valentine standards. T iffany's big sellers are engagement rings and heart-shaped jewelry. For Godiva, the upscale chocolatier, Valentine's Day is the busiest of the year. Many retailers are selling Valentine's variants of regular merchandise: heart-motif napkins and dishes from Williams-Sonoma, Cupid bears adorned with wings and bows from the Vermont Teddy Bear Co. Sears, Roebuck and Co., offering women a way to give Valentine candy sans all the lace and ribbons, is selling chocolates shaped like Craftsmen tools by mail-order. Then there are companies using the high-tech to put a new twist on old ideas. Telechip Inc. of Bally, Pa., sells teddy bears that speak, thanks to recordable computer chips activated when the bears are squeezed. A Valentine shopper calls the company and records a message that is then encoded on the chip and sewn inside the bear, which arrives by mail in a few days. Some entrepreneurs try to promote the least romantic-sounding businesses as Valentine-friendly. MYO Systems, which makes the MET-Rx dietary supplement, offered to exchange high-protein food bars to the first 500 people who sent the company their boxes of Valentin e chocolates. It publicized the swap by sayi ng the holiday "should be romantic, loving, giving, but most of all, healthy." But even among the fi tness-inclined, Valentine's Day is a time for tradition. So florists prepared to be in undated with requests for roses, and to a lesser extent, other flowers. A spokeswoman for 1-800-Plowers, Marjorie Cader, said the company expects to deliver between 2 million and 3 million roses for Valentine's Day, the industry's Teddy bears, cards, chocolates a.ad roses are Valentine favorites, but they're also second-biggest holiday part of the high-tech revolution. after Mother's Day. Ms. Cader said 1800-Flowers does 10 percent to 12 percent of its giving cards, after Christmas, says the Greeting Card Valentine business on-line, a figure expected to Association, which tallied $1 billion in Valentine increase as on-line services expand. sales in J 993. But French said it's the No. 1 holiday Even greeting cards are getting a little high-tech. for Gibson's sales at supermarkets, largely because Among Hallmark Cards' l,700 ·Valentine designs are food stores also sell flowers and candy. some with chips that play music or allow the giver to Valentine's Day is a tough time for any retailers record a message, and several with phone cards that who'd like to bring in sales early. Many shoppers allow recipients to make free phone calls. particularly men - don't hit the stores until Feb. 14 Gibson Greetings spokesman Don French said his itself. company's musical cards do especially well because "You can tell it's going to happen," Anderson said. of the traditional link between Valentine's Day and By Valentine's Day, his card store shelves are "empty love songs. except for the wife-sweetheart section." There are also computer terminals in larger card On the big day, "men are usually about four or five deep in the card aisles," he said. For these desperate stores that allow people to personalize cards with their own messages, or the recipient's name. Many souls, "anything will do." shoppers like the machines, but "they're Peter Clarke, Godiva's director of retail intimidating to a lot of people," said Don Anderson, merchandising, recalled the time a customer showed owner of four Cardtique stores in York and up at one of the company's stores two hours after Lancaster, Pa. closing time "and begged and pleaded on his knees for us to reopen." Valentine's Day is the second-biggest holiday for 366 in some years," Krone said of commercial rose bush~.· · Valentine rose production starts around Christmas, when. growers plan their crops and pinch their bushes to the most blossoms ready £or mio-February. ~ pinching, it takes 45 days for the plant to · produce the roses, which are harvested twice a day, 6 to 7 days before they are expected to be: sold to the public. The most popular commercial. red.roses have names ~eRoyalty, Cara Mia, Saman~ and Kardmal, Kroq~ satd. ' ' ' . When as~ why the American Beauty rose isn't on that list, Krone said tht!national flower isn't a good enough producer, and tends to wilt eai:lier than the " newer hybrids. ·"It's really .n o longer ayailable," he said. In otherw:ords, it's bee.ti supplanted by technology. Jut~ ' . ~ |