Just came across a good article about how 1-800Flowers.com prepare to scale for Valentine’s Day. Any related retailer knows that Valentine’s Day is one day where you don’t want to be caught with your pants down. Everyone buys things at the last minute, which poses a scaling problem for everyone. It’s not the sustained throughput, but rather the peak that comes like a tsunami. Anyway, 1-800Flowers.com deal with this by having 3 geographically dispersed sites and by starting their stress testing from January. Check out the article here