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If you are poorish and have 35 minutes to spare, you might consider "disrupting" the all-powerful Edible Arrangement industry. As I did. End result: I saved $100 and wasted 35 minutes.
Step 1: Find an Edible Arrangement to steal.
By way of background: I am not actually planning to give my wife a fruit-salad-with-sticks for Valentine's Day. She loves me and I'm sure would feign appreciation, but that's a little sketchy, even for me. What I hoped to do instead was figure out if other suitors, perhaps ones with a stronger aesthetic sense than myself, could quickly and cheaply cobble together an Edible Arrangement simulacrum that would please even the most standoffish of partners.
So I went to the Edible Arrangements website and picked out a particularly spectacular offering. This one, the "Valentine's Day Bouquet (Large)" (which the image filename indicates is in other months called something to do with "Lovely Berries"). It retails for $129 and zero cents, and is comprised of pineapple hearts, chocolate-dipped strawberries, and little red grapes. It comes in what looks like a metal basket. And so, I had my shopping list.
Step 2: Buy the ingredients.
Our office is near Union Square in Manhattan, home to one of New York's many small bodegas. So I went to Whole Foods, because 1) it was easy, and 2) it seemed like I'd be spotting Edible Arrangements a bit of a head start on cost, given how generally expensive everything at Whole Foods tends to be.