6 ms·

I spent some time researching this mostly because I was curious, but basically the answer to "why are weddings so expensive" and also "why is it so hard to disr

I spent some time researching this mostly because I was curious, but basically the answer to "why are weddings so expensive" and also "why is it so hard to disrupt the wedding industry" are largely the same in my opinion: Because people have extremely high expectations for the major expenses of a wedding (venue, flowers, band, etc.). The joke (and I even see it here) is that you can go to a baker and say "I want a cake" and they'll say "$20" but if you say "it's for a wedding" the price becomes $100. Why? Because if one iota of that cake is decorated incorrectly, the baker will hear hell about it - maybe not from your wedding party, but for every reasonable wedding party there are 99 expecting perfection. So, it's not a huge surprise to me that wedding vendors have been hard to disrupt - it seems logical to assume that mass market usually comes with a reduction in quality compared to bespoke (or at least a bespoke-like experience), and people mostly refuse that and are willing to pay a huge premium for weddings (begrudgingly, admittedly).

ghaff 8y ago
Wedding photography is another somewhat similar example. I've shot weddings for friends who just wanted some decent memory pictures. In school, I also shot a couple weddings for friends of friends for a small fee who were economizing. Or you can spend many thousands of dollars. In this case, it's not so much that wedding photography is a particularly high margin occupation but it's another example of going with a higher-end service than many people would consider for anything else in their lives.
- burfog 8y ago
  I just wanted some decent memory pictures, and this is how I inadvertently discovered that I am a good photographer. We put out cameras and asked for photos. I assumed that everybody would take photos just like I do. I had never thought that I was a superior photographer, but the results disabused me of that notion. Nobody paid attention to the background or bothered to frame things well, even when they had us pose for photos. My mother-in-law sent us an enlarged photo featuring an ugly old statue... oh, and us too. It looked like a photo taken to commemorate our trip to visit a statue.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    I'm a reasonable photographer and my friends knew that. (I was photo editor of my undergrad newspaper, a photographer for various other publications, and earned beer money from my undergrad's alumni association for reunions, etc.) Having said that, I have no real knowledge of all the conventions and tasks required for a "traditional" wedding shoot whether purely conventional or some particular style. And many people have serious expectations about those things. There's no way I would accept money to work as a typical professional wedding photographer. Mind you, I do shoot corporate events and other things (concerts, sports) from time to time unpaid. If someone wanted to pay me to do something like that I'd be happy to. Especially with digital these days, I'm very confident I'll produce something very publishable.
dudul 8y ago
> you can go to a baker and say "I want a cake" and they'll say "$20" but if you say "it's for a wedding" the price becomes $100 This is very important to keep in mind. Never mention that you are working on organizing a wedding. Renting chairs? It's just for a party. Getting flowers? It's for a birthday. Vendors will almost always apply a huge markup when they hear "wedding".
- johannes1234321 8y ago
  Also brings fun to the party if the cake says "Happy Birthday" instead of having two figures on top :-)
  - WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
    "Honey, I didn't feel alive until we got married, so I've reborn.... also, we saved like 15k which we can use for a downpayment on that house you wanted us to eventually own."
- wgerard 8y ago
  That can be a really dangerous game to play, fwiw. If a vendor figures out you're lying to them ("gee, I wonder why this birthday party wants boutonnieres and corsages") they can (and probably will) just bail on you and leave you scrambling. You usually sign pretty tight contracts/agreements for a wedding, less-so for a birthday party.
  - doubletgl 8y ago
    I think it's up to the customer to decide how the use the purchased product or service, since when do you owe an explanation to a vendor where or how their product will be used? If they add wedding-markup for no other reason (like increased quality control or something) nobody should feel bad about lying to them.
    - wgerard 8y ago
      > I think it's up to the customer to decide how the use the purchased product or service, since when do you owe an explanation to a vendor where or how their product will be used? It goes both ways. The vendor can also decide they don't want to deal with a customer who's being intentionally dishonest with them. It's quite simple for them to just refund your deposit/money and leave you without a florist a week before your wedding, especially since you didn't sign the type of two-way "binding" (I'm using that term loosely here) agreement that you do with a wedding. I spoke to several vendors in the course of my research who handled situations like that in exactly that manner, for what it's worth. In one case the vendor arrived at the venue on the day-of, realized it was a wedding, and straight up just turned around and went home. Another basically required a "security deposit" that would be returned once the vendor confirmed the event wasn't actually a wedding.
dx034 8y ago
In addition to that, weddings are very seasonal. Prices are often only a fraction if you get married out of season (e.g. getting a photographer during the week in winter). Vendors specialized on weddings have to make most of their annual income on maybe a dozen weekends per year.
- wgerard 8y ago
  Yeah, to me this is the biggest pro-tip if you want to save a ton of money but still want a big traditional wedding: Get married in the winter.
  - dagw 8y ago
    Seconded. Got married in November and had zero problems booking churches, venues or anything else for the exact date we wanted.
    - baud147258 8y ago
      The issue is that some venues are closed outside of summer. But it's a still good idea (both of my brothers had their wedding in October).
    - stevekemp 8y ago
      I picked December, but only so the date could be 11/12/13. Of course our wedding was in the morning, and later that day there was a story published in several newspapers about a couple that had managed to get married on 11/12/13 at 14:15. I'm still amazed that didn't occur to me!
  - astura 8y ago
    The people I personally know who having a "traditional" wedding was so important to them, they included the season to be just as important as everything else... So I'm guess people who get married in June are probably(?) more likely to spring for the silk seat covers (or whatever).
    - 8y ago
JMTQp8lwXL 8y ago
I don't know if I believe the price goes up that much because of the fear of a Bridezilla. I would compare it more to, a regular cake has like, 2 9's SLA of being what you wanted. But for a wedding cake, people want 5 9's. They want enterprise Cake, that's always available and exactly as they expected. So that's what they pay for. If I was working with a vendor, a plain-old regular cake with 2 9's availability would be fine for me. I'm unwilling to pay 4x as much for something, just to chase a very diminishing improvement.
- wgerard 8y ago
  Hmm, I don't feel like your conclusion follows from your premises. > I don't know if I believe the price goes up that much because of the fear of [an overly zealous wedding party member] > But for a wedding cake, people want 5 9's. They want enterprise Cake, that's always available and exactly as they expected. I see those two things as related, I guess. Nobody knows the difference between 2 9's and 5 9's until the service goes down or something goes unexpectedly. > If I was working with a vendor, a plain-old regular cake with 2 9's availability would be fine for me. Unfortunately for the vendor, since you're not ever going to be a repeat customer they have no idea which type of customer you are and have to assume you want 5 9's even if you're saying otherwise - or that you want 5 9's for the 2 9's price. The opposite of a lemon market, I suppose (a peach market?). Look at it from their perspective: The worst case scenario is they give you the 2 9's price but you expect the 5 9's and complain loudly when you don't get that.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 8y ago
    Cake is a commodity. I don't have to buy it from a vendor that specializes specifically in wedding cakes. I should have set the premise up a little better: I can go to my local supermarket (2 9s) and order several cakes of different sizes, and get a fancy serving tray, to get the multi-tiered cake appearance that's classically what I think of, when I think wedding cake. If my supermarket doesn't give me exactly what I want, nobody would really care, since most people don't go to supermarkets to by Enterprise Cake. They go with a more specialized vendor (5 9s).
stevenking86 8y ago
This is exactly right. My wife worked in the wedding industry for a long time and so she was aware of this when we finally decided to tie the knot. For each vendor we spoke with we only told them we were having an engagement party. We got the prices and then later revealed that this was for a wedding. We advise all of our friends that are getting married to do the same. You can save a decent chunk of change.
- travisjungroth 8y ago
  There are lots of ways to save money if you're okay with lying.
  - AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
    You live with wolves, you howl like one.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- qzw 8y ago
  I have no doubt this works, but if the majority of couples did as you suggest, I imagine the cost of "engagement parties" will rise to something similar to weddings.
Udik 8y ago
> the price becomes $100. Why? Because if one iota of that cake is decorated incorrectly... I don't agree on your why. The point is not perfection; the point is that a wedding is supposed to show affluence. It's in the same ballpark as a present to your fiancée (remember the rule of thumb for the price of the engagement ring: three times the gross monthly earnings whatever they are- which means: expensive by any standard). And I suspect this is valid across many cultures, so I'd say the reason is more or less anthropological. Thriftiness is rarely valued when it comes to these things.
- wgerard 8y ago
  > The point is not perfection; the point is that a wedding is supposed to show affluence I would argue strongly that these two things are highly related. Nobody attaches a physical price tag to their cake at the wedding - it looks immaculate, so you just assume it probably cost a lot. Also likely why people get upset when it's NOT immaculate - it looks cheaper.
  - Udik 8y ago
    Good point. But also fewer want to haggle on prices when planning a wedding, because they're supposed to burn a relevant amount of cash anyway. When you go to buy that cake you've likely already decided how much you're going to spend in total, based on what's expected in your and your partner's background.
    - wgerard 8y ago
      People don't haggle on prices because largely in western culture we just assume the price is the price and we can either pay it or go somewhere else. I imagine a fair amount of haggling goes on in cultures where that's a standard affair.
      - ghaff 8y ago
        That's true. But I can guarantee you that people who run events for a living negotiate with venues and other suppliers all the time.
baxtr 8y ago
Because it’s (supposed to be) once in a lifetime. No reason to risk THE day in your life to save some “pennies”, you won’t get a second chance. That’s the feeling everybody involved in the industry is making money on.
Broken_Hippo 8y ago
To be fair on the cake: Most regular cakes are small affairs. If you go to that same baker and ask for a 3-tier, ornately decorated cake that will feed at least 50-100 people and has a keepsake decoration on top, it'll be more. Cakes like that are a different beast. They require special recipes so they don't collapse themselves. I know professional bakeries are able to spend less time than I did making my sister's wedding cake - a 3-tier affair - but they are still a decent amount of work and effort. Doubly so if you are paying the baker to transport and assemble the cake. So yeah, of course wedding cakes are expensive, depending on the bells and whistles. But so are equally decadent cakes with the bells and whistles.
- wgerard 8y ago
  Also a very fair point.
- astura 8y ago
  So I was under the impression it was common for the bottom layers of wedding cakes to be Styrofoam and the top layer was only used for cake cutting/pictures and the cake served to the guests was a sheet cake.
  - Broken_Hippo 8y ago
    That is an option - some or all of the cake being completely fake, but I have honestly never seen one. It is just as common to go with a smaller cake plus the sheet cake for more guests. Most of these options are to cut down on the actual costs of the cake: It is easier to decorate styrofoam and much easier to deal with a smaller layer cake than a large sheet cake. I, however, did not go that route :)
dotancohen 8y ago
Sounds a lot like the satellite launch market before 2010. Thankfully, since then there is a new baker on the block.
- wgerard 8y ago
  I don't think the two industries are at all comparable.
  - ratling 8y ago
    What if I want to have my wedding in low earth orbit?
gist 8y ago
> the baker will hear hell about it - maybe not from your wedding party, but for every reasonable wedding party there are 99 expecting perfection. Note and important that the baker is not insulated in any way from the aggravation and the bad feelings as a result of a problem. They will hear about it and they will live it. This is pretty much true for any small business. In other words if you are Comcast the CEO is well insulated from the pain and agony of any customers. Ditto for Airlines and so on. But the front office staff and/or the people who actually take the calls. Sure they hear about it and sure they might perceive it's a problem but they are not hearing the actual customer pain and getting aggravated. The baker will have someone come into the shop and they will see and feel the pain directly.

ghaff 8y ago

Wedding photography is another somewhat similar example. I've shot weddings for friends who just wanted some decent memory pictures. In school, I also shot a couple weddings for friends of friends for a small fee who were economizing. Or you can spend many thousands of dollars. In this case, it's not so much that wedding photography is a particularly high margin occupation but it's another example of going with a higher-end service than many people would consider for anything else in their lives.

burfog 8y ago
I just wanted some decent memory pictures, and this is how I inadvertently discovered that I am a good photographer. We put out cameras and asked for photos. I assumed that everybody would take photos just like I do. I had never thought that I was a superior photographer, but the results disabused me of that notion. Nobody paid attention to the background or bothered to frame things well, even when they had us pose for photos. My mother-in-law sent us an enlarged photo featuring an ugly old statue... oh, and us too. It looked like a photo taken to commemorate our trip to visit a statue.
- ghaff 8y ago
  I'm a reasonable photographer and my friends knew that. (I was photo editor of my undergrad newspaper, a photographer for various other publications, and earned beer money from my undergrad's alumni association for reunions, etc.) Having said that, I have no real knowledge of all the conventions and tasks required for a "traditional" wedding shoot whether purely conventional or some particular style. And many people have serious expectations about those things. There's no way I would accept money to work as a typical professional wedding photographer. Mind you, I do shoot corporate events and other things (concerts, sports) from time to time unpaid. If someone wanted to pay me to do something like that I'd be happy to. Especially with digital these days, I'm very confident I'll produce something very publishable.

dudul 8y ago

> you can go to a baker and say "I want a cake" and they'll say "$20" but if you say "it's for a wedding" the price becomes $100 This is very important to keep in mind. Never mention that you are working on organizing a wedding. Renting chairs? It's just for a party. Getting flowers? It's for a birthday. Vendors will almost always apply a huge markup when they hear "wedding".

johannes1234321 8y ago
Also brings fun to the party if the cake says "Happy Birthday" instead of having two figures on top :-)
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
  "Honey, I didn't feel alive until we got married, so I've reborn.... also, we saved like 15k which we can use for a downpayment on that house you wanted us to eventually own."
wgerard 8y ago
That can be a really dangerous game to play, fwiw. If a vendor figures out you're lying to them ("gee, I wonder why this birthday party wants boutonnieres and corsages") they can (and probably will) just bail on you and leave you scrambling. You usually sign pretty tight contracts/agreements for a wedding, less-so for a birthday party.
- doubletgl 8y ago
  I think it's up to the customer to decide how the use the purchased product or service, since when do you owe an explanation to a vendor where or how their product will be used? If they add wedding-markup for no other reason (like increased quality control or something) nobody should feel bad about lying to them.
  - wgerard 8y ago
    > I think it's up to the customer to decide how the use the purchased product or service, since when do you owe an explanation to a vendor where or how their product will be used? It goes both ways. The vendor can also decide they don't want to deal with a customer who's being intentionally dishonest with them. It's quite simple for them to just refund your deposit/money and leave you without a florist a week before your wedding, especially since you didn't sign the type of two-way "binding" (I'm using that term loosely here) agreement that you do with a wedding. I spoke to several vendors in the course of my research who handled situations like that in exactly that manner, for what it's worth. In one case the vendor arrived at the venue on the day-of, realized it was a wedding, and straight up just turned around and went home. Another basically required a "security deposit" that would be returned once the vendor confirmed the event wasn't actually a wedding.

dx034 8y ago

In addition to that, weddings are very seasonal. Prices are often only a fraction if you get married out of season (e.g. getting a photographer during the week in winter). Vendors specialized on weddings have to make most of their annual income on maybe a dozen weekends per year.

wgerard 8y ago
Yeah, to me this is the biggest pro-tip if you want to save a ton of money but still want a big traditional wedding: Get married in the winter.
- dagw 8y ago
  Seconded. Got married in November and had zero problems booking churches, venues or anything else for the exact date we wanted.
  - baud147258 8y ago
    The issue is that some venues are closed outside of summer. But it's a still good idea (both of my brothers had their wedding in October).
  - stevekemp 8y ago
    I picked December, but only so the date could be 11/12/13. Of course our wedding was in the morning, and later that day there was a story published in several newspapers about a couple that had managed to get married on 11/12/13 at 14:15. I'm still amazed that didn't occur to me!
- astura 8y ago
  The people I personally know who having a "traditional" wedding was so important to them, they included the season to be just as important as everything else... So I'm guess people who get married in June are probably(?) more likely to spring for the silk seat covers (or whatever).
  - 8y ago

JMTQp8lwXL 8y ago

I don't know if I believe the price goes up that much because of the fear of a Bridezilla. I would compare it more to, a regular cake has like, 2 9's SLA of being what you wanted. But for a wedding cake, people want 5 9's. They want enterprise Cake, that's always available and exactly as they expected. So that's what they pay for. If I was working with a vendor, a plain-old regular cake with 2 9's availability would be fine for me. I'm unwilling to pay 4x as much for something, just to chase a very diminishing improvement.

wgerard 8y ago
Hmm, I don't feel like your conclusion follows from your premises. > I don't know if I believe the price goes up that much because of the fear of [an overly zealous wedding party member] > But for a wedding cake, people want 5 9's. They want enterprise Cake, that's always available and exactly as they expected. I see those two things as related, I guess. Nobody knows the difference between 2 9's and 5 9's until the service goes down or something goes unexpectedly. > If I was working with a vendor, a plain-old regular cake with 2 9's availability would be fine for me. Unfortunately for the vendor, since you're not ever going to be a repeat customer they have no idea which type of customer you are and have to assume you want 5 9's even if you're saying otherwise - or that you want 5 9's for the 2 9's price. The opposite of a lemon market, I suppose (a peach market?). Look at it from their perspective: The worst case scenario is they give you the 2 9's price but you expect the 5 9's and complain loudly when you don't get that.
- JMTQp8lwXL 8y ago
  Cake is a commodity. I don't have to buy it from a vendor that specializes specifically in wedding cakes. I should have set the premise up a little better: I can go to my local supermarket (2 9s) and order several cakes of different sizes, and get a fancy serving tray, to get the multi-tiered cake appearance that's classically what I think of, when I think wedding cake. If my supermarket doesn't give me exactly what I want, nobody would really care, since most people don't go to supermarkets to by Enterprise Cake. They go with a more specialized vendor (5 9s).

stevenking86 8y ago

This is exactly right. My wife worked in the wedding industry for a long time and so she was aware of this when we finally decided to tie the knot. For each vendor we spoke with we only told them we were having an engagement party. We got the prices and then later revealed that this was for a wedding. We advise all of our friends that are getting married to do the same. You can save a decent chunk of change.

travisjungroth 8y ago
There are lots of ways to save money if you're okay with lying.
- AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
  You live with wolves, you howl like one.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
qzw 8y ago
I have no doubt this works, but if the majority of couples did as you suggest, I imagine the cost of "engagement parties" will rise to something similar to weddings.

Udik 8y ago

> the price becomes $100. Why? Because if one iota of that cake is decorated incorrectly... I don't agree on your why. The point is not perfection; the point is that a wedding is supposed to show affluence. It's in the same ballpark as a present to your fiancée (remember the rule of thumb for the price of the engagement ring: three times the gross monthly earnings whatever they are- which means: expensive by any standard). And I suspect this is valid across many cultures, so I'd say the reason is more or less anthropological. Thriftiness is rarely valued when it comes to these things.

wgerard 8y ago
> The point is not perfection; the point is that a wedding is supposed to show affluence I would argue strongly that these two things are highly related. Nobody attaches a physical price tag to their cake at the wedding - it looks immaculate, so you just assume it probably cost a lot. Also likely why people get upset when it's NOT immaculate - it looks cheaper.
- Udik 8y ago
  Good point. But also fewer want to haggle on prices when planning a wedding, because they're supposed to burn a relevant amount of cash anyway. When you go to buy that cake you've likely already decided how much you're going to spend in total, based on what's expected in your and your partner's background.
  - wgerard 8y ago
    People don't haggle on prices because largely in western culture we just assume the price is the price and we can either pay it or go somewhere else. I imagine a fair amount of haggling goes on in cultures where that's a standard affair.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      That's true. But I can guarantee you that people who run events for a living negotiate with venues and other suppliers all the time.

baxtr 8y ago

Because it’s (supposed to be) once in a lifetime. No reason to risk THE day in your life to save some “pennies”, you won’t get a second chance. That’s the feeling everybody involved in the industry is making money on.

Broken_Hippo 8y ago

To be fair on the cake: Most regular cakes are small affairs. If you go to that same baker and ask for a 3-tier, ornately decorated cake that will feed at least 50-100 people and has a keepsake decoration on top, it'll be more. Cakes like that are a different beast. They require special recipes so they don't collapse themselves. I know professional bakeries are able to spend less time than I did making my sister's wedding cake - a 3-tier affair - but they are still a decent amount of work and effort. Doubly so if you are paying the baker to transport and assemble the cake. So yeah, of course wedding cakes are expensive, depending on the bells and whistles. But so are equally decadent cakes with the bells and whistles.

wgerard 8y ago
Also a very fair point.
astura 8y ago
So I was under the impression it was common for the bottom layers of wedding cakes to be Styrofoam and the top layer was only used for cake cutting/pictures and the cake served to the guests was a sheet cake.
- Broken_Hippo 8y ago
  That is an option - some or all of the cake being completely fake, but I have honestly never seen one. It is just as common to go with a smaller cake plus the sheet cake for more guests. Most of these options are to cut down on the actual costs of the cake: It is easier to decorate styrofoam and much easier to deal with a smaller layer cake than a large sheet cake. I, however, did not go that route :)

dotancohen 8y ago

Sounds a lot like the satellite launch market before 2010. Thankfully, since then there is a new baker on the block.

wgerard 8y ago
I don't think the two industries are at all comparable.
- ratling 8y ago
  What if I want to have my wedding in low earth orbit?

gist 8y ago

> the baker will hear hell about it - maybe not from your wedding party, but for every reasonable wedding party there are 99 expecting perfection. Note and important that the baker is not insulated in any way from the aggravation and the bad feelings as a result of a problem. They will hear about it and they will live it. This is pretty much true for any small business. In other words if you are Comcast the CEO is well insulated from the pain and agony of any customers. Ditto for Airlines and so on. But the front office staff and/or the people who actually take the calls. Sure they hear about it and sure they might perceive it's a problem but they are not hearing the actual customer pain and getting aggravated. The baker will have someone come into the shop and they will see and feel the pain directly.