Last-minute offerings of love/ Buying gifts for Valentine's Day

Gazette, The (Colorado Springs), Feb 14, 2003 by JEN MULSON

They huddled by the card rack, furtively reading and rereading. They crammed into the candy store clutching their line numbers, and picked through the picked-over, premade bouquets in the grocery stores.

They are the last-minute Valentine's Day shoppers, mostly embarrassed and mostly male, caught red-handed with their whole arm in the procrastination cookie jar.

Excuses for putting it off until the last second?

"Because I'm a man."

"I finally got out of the house. I had surgery."

"I wanted the flowers to be really fresh! "

If a press release from the National Retail Federation is any indication, however, men are going big this year, though not quite as big as last year.

The average man reportedly plans to spend $125.96 on Valentine's Day. That's down from $158 in 2002. Women, on average, will spend $38.22 on the big day. That number is up from $36 last year.

Close to 60 percent of couples will spend a romantic evening out, and gifts will be lavished upon significant others. About 65 percent of men will send flowers, 32 percent ply with candy and 21 percent buy pretty baubles.

Thanks to retailers everywhere, Valentine's Day is shoved in our collective faces beginning around New Year's. Every visit to the grocery store or the mall is one more reminder of the day of reckoning.

It can be the test of a new-found love or the deal-breaker in a foundering relationship. It can be a frustrating moment of indecision or a sparkle of clarity.

"I wasn't sure I was going to actually get one for somebody," Kelly Bales said, shopping for her boyfriend of one year.

She hesitated in CJ Kard, the downtown greeting card store, weighing two romantic cards, one with printed sentiments and one with lots of white space.

"I'm thinking about getting two different cards. I'll save it for next year," she said.

Many of the last-minute men were longtime husbands, buying up Michelle's chocolates.

Roger Nutter had a romantic evening all planned out, but he needed a bit of the sweet stuff to round the night out.

"I'll take her to her favorite dinner place, Country Buffet, and have a real romantic evening at home with a favorite beverage and a log on the fire," he said. "I'm here for chocolate for dessert."

Though most last-minute shoppers realized their procrastination skills were top-notch, others were offended. "I'm doing it a day early! It's another day for her to enjoy them," said Bob Niebuhr, shopping in the floral department of King Soopers.

Don Downing, another shopper in the floral department at King Soopers, summed it up nicely.

"Men think all these holidays are invented by Hallmark," he said.