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Since I'm creating a wedding startup, the insane amount of money people throw at one event has been in my mind lately... It's a brutal cycle — the weddings fea
by limedaring 16y ago
Since I'm creating a wedding startup, the insane amount of money people throw at one event has been in my mind lately...
It's a brutal cycle — the weddings featured in magazines and online are almost always out of the average couples budget, and what those stories do is create the idea of "this is what you should have". Couples then concern themselves with having the best card boxes, the perfect playlist, hand making favors that will be thrown out the next day by the majority of their guests, because this is what they're told is the right way of throwing a wedding. A one day event that people spend way too much money on because they're persuaded to by this industry.
- rdtsc 16y agoThis calls for another startup -- the funeral startup. Weddings and funerals are businesses with huge markups. There is a lot of emotional attachment involved in both, and people will be willing to shell out enormous amounts of money on such events.
- limedaring 16y agoOh my goodness, I totally agree. Did you know they sell decorative boxes to be cremated in? Nevermind you're never going to see the box, nor will the deceased care which box they're in, all it's going to do is _burn_ but the funeral people are all, "what, you'd burn your father in a cardboard box? How horrible."
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- hartror 16y agoPut me in a cardboard box, bury me and plant a tree above me.
- silverbax88 16y agoI tell my wife all of the time, "if I die first, get the cheapest funeral possible. A cardboard box is fine. If you spend too much I will come back and haunt you."
- samg 16y agoAnd of course baby showers and the like as well.
- patio11 16y agoThe ladies play bingo at baby showers. I was similarly ignorant about checks stats ten thousand dollars ago.
- tapp 16y agoThere's one in the current YC crop, isn't there? Somebody posted a write-up not to long ago. 1000memories, I believe.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- tapp 16y agoI was actually responding to @rdtsc's comment above: "This calls for another startup -- the funeral startup."
- jackowayed 16y agoSorry, didn't read carefully enough.
- prawn 16y agoI think that's one influence, but a great many people do it to impress their friends. You don't want to be the couple that had that bland, short wedding where there were no hook-ups, the dancefloor didn't go nuts, that one person didn't embarrass themselves, no one kicked on afterwards until 4am and people still weren't talking about it years later, do you?
- gnaritas 16y agoYes. Many of us don't give a rats ass about impressing anyone, that's not the point of a wedding.
- ShardPhoenix 16y agoYes it is!
- antareus 16y agoThe problem is a cultural narrative of "this is my perfect day!" This is what creates bridezilla out of otherwise very nice (but, not self-aware-enough) women.
- gnaritas 16y agoThat's the female narrative, we're on hacker news, I was assuming he was asking the male point of view. I certainly don't know any men who thought "this is my perfect day".
- prawn 16y agoIt's a wedding. In the majority of cases, the male point of view is irrelevant. Also, as I said elsewhere in this thread, what a woman might say in theory or outside of planning mode is often quite different to how they'll act once things get real. (Recently married for the second time, FWIW.)
- gnaritas 16y ago
- nick_santillo 16y agoI find that very interesting as well. I'm getting married in May and quickly figured this out... its about the union of two people and what makes them happy, not how many layers the cake is or how expensive the party favors are... we opted for a destination wedding with the closest people to us - instead of 200 people in a giant, expensive, impersonal function hall
- Tichy 16y agoIt's an advantage to marry young, then. The older the get, the more friends have invited you to their own wedding. Maybe I worry too much, but I feel uneasy about not returning the favour. Then again, maybe attending another person's wedding is the actual favour. After all, it usually costs a lot of money to attend a wedding, too.
- gaelian 16y agoMy wife is involved in the wedding industry. Both she and I have commented at various times that if people invested less in their wedding day and more in their ongoing relationship after the day, they'd often be better off.
- billybob 16y agoThe sad thing is that money problems are a major cause of divorce. Starting out with a bunch of wedding debt is not helpful. As several folks told my wife and I, "the marriage is more important than the wedding." Our wedding was wonderful, but simple and cheap - I think about $3,000 (with lots of help from friends). But from the start - from dating to pre-marital counseling to continued investment in our relationship - we've been focused on our marriage itself.
- jlgbecom 16y agoI think the best advice I ever got from my parents about weddings is that you have to have really good food. Nobody hardly remembers anything else, even the bride's dress, but if you have incredible food, people will talk about it for a decade. This may be biased, being from a southern Italian family, but I think it's good advice.