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Comment by wgerard | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

Also a very fair point.

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

Seconded. Got married in November and had zero problems booking churches, venues or anything else for the exact date we wanted.

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).

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!

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).

Yeah, I think my point was more: If you're being price conscious and aren't willing to have a more non-traditional (e.g. no/minimal flowers) wedding in June, your best bet is to have your large traditional wedding in November.

Truthfully, the part the guests largely enjoy is the reception (which is often indoors anyway), so it's really not a bad idea at all.

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.

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.

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).

I still don't think this follows.

You can go to a specialized cake vendor and still get a 2 9s cake - many people do, in fact, for special non-wedding events (for, say, a 60th birthday). That cake will still be significantly less expensive than if you tell the specialized cake vendor it's for a wedding.

Enterprise cake comes in many flavors :).

Interesting, how about RAIC(ake)? Order several of the 2x9s cakes and use the best one(s) on the day.

If the premium for a wedding cake is really 2x as much as a regular one, you could use 2 less-reputable vendors and hope at least one comes through.

Which is an absolutely crazy notion, but I don't see why we can't apply our learnings from things like managing AWS costs (on demand instances vs. pre-emptible instances) to wedding supplies.

Even better, _display_ the best of the cakes but _serve_ them all. The honour of having the cake displayed - ahem advertising - goes to the baker with the best cake.

Of course, to judge which cake was tastiest, one would have to measure lick-through rates.

This is how Jeff Bezos would plan a wedding. Just like how all those cities made pretty proposals for HQ2. Oof, too soon.

Just as an addendum to your 5 9's concept - there's a level of stress that comes with providing this, and it's considerable.

You're paying them to absorb that stress and ensure that everything's perfect without having to manage them. It's me saying - I need exactly this, at this exact time, on this exact date, in this exact location. I need it perfect, no ifs ands or buts, no excuses, no reasons, no failures. Perfect. Period.

When providing this level of expectation, when any kind of failure or indeed anything less than absolute perfection is not an option, when there's no chances for do-overs, the stress load that comes with providing that is huge.

I'm not in the wedding planning business, but I'm a service provider in the tech market. As a service provider, if you want me to absorb that level of stress so that you don't even have to think about it, I'm capable, I can and I will absorb all of it. I will shield you from it all and show up with exactly what you ask, exactly when you need it, no failures, no excuses. But you're going to pay for the stress that causes me... and it doesn't come cheap. But it is dependable.

There's a reason you have a wedding planner for your perfect day and they're not just charging you for their planning skills. You're paying them for absorbing all the stress so that you just have to show up and have enjoy your fairy tale day.

You can only live under that kind of stress load for a finite period. Most people crumble in days or weeks. Forget lasting months or years. Eventually everyone breaks. Do you really want to break before your big day?

If you don't want to pay so much, you have to be prepared to throw out your expectations and go for something more relaxed. If relaxed is your bag (it is mine), then you won't have to pay 5 9's prices because you're not putting everyone under the pressure of delivering perfection.

Personally, I fall into a similar boat. There's few things I need 5 9's on in life, beyond access to oxygen to maintain life.

As I mentioned in another comment, I know a couple that substituted cupcakes in place of cake. Not only are cupcakes way easier to make than a multi-tiered cake, but they're quicker to serve, so guests aren't standing around waiting for dessert.

Even though you'd still have stipulation of "the cupcakes must be at this time and place", surely it's much easier to deliver on that. I bet they saved a bit on dessert costs.

Delivering to a time and place is easy if there's no expectation that every one of them is perfect. If expectations are relaxed, the prices are too.

Like you say, very little needs 5 9s. Many people want that and get their hopes up to be able to expect that and then complain about the price without thinking about the level of stress that puts on everyone.

My Mum baked and decorated my cake. She's not a baker, she's not a cake decoration specialist. She's just my Mum. I wanted the cake that reminded me of my childhood and that's exactly what I got. I knew she could do it, she's done it a thousand times in my life. It was never going to be perfect. It never needed to be perfect, yet it was perfect to me. I didn't care what anyone else thought. It served exactly the purpose I needed it to - I needed it to be a piece of who I am. It was comfort food - my Mum's cake. That was everything to me... and it was free.

My best friend's Mum from when I was a kid was like a 2nd Mum to me. She's been a florist my whole life. I asked her for flowers and gave her free reign on making the place look pretty. No stipulations, no expectations. She did a wonderful job with flowers she already had to hand and she loved doing it. She only charged me for her costs.

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.

There are lots of ways to save money if you're okay with lying.

You live with wolves, you howl like one.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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".

Also brings fun to the party if the cake says "Happy Birthday" instead of having two figures on top :-)

"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."

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.

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.

> 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.

TBH, those vendors sound seriously sketchy absent some credible explanation for why they think they need to charge more for a wedding.

If a vendor who supplies kids' entertainment rental (like those blow-up house things) tried to charge more for their services at a wedding than at a birthday party, I'd think they were trying to gouge. Flowers, something I know very little about, I could understand being treated differently for a wedding than other events, but I'd be interested in why.

> TBH, those vendors sound seriously sketchy absent some credible explanation for why they think they need to charge more for a wedding.

I mean, you can just ask why if you're curious. Most of them are sole proprietorships. It's not like you're dealing with a large corporation where pricing is set by a corporate office.

Re: bailing, honestly I think most of them just react negatively to being lied to because there's some element of a personal relationship involved in this kind of service. I'd similarly be pretty pissed if my boss lied to me intentionally about what I was working on.

There is more on the line when a wedding is involved. The "narrative" that is the wedding causes more stress when all details don't fit the couples narrative. You are not just paying for goods you are paying for the service and priority. When the flowers have to be the right kind and the right shade of red there is extra work that goes into making that happen. Yes, some brides are happy to go down to city hall and have the reception at their favorite bar while others want all details to fit their narrative (that comes with a big price tag).

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Plenty of people have to organize a wedding within a budget and are under pressure to get more for their money when planning a wedding. Therefore I'm not convinced that "supposed to burn a relevant amount of cash" makes them less price sensitive.

> But also fewer want to haggle on prices when planning a wedding

To overgeneralize a lot, but nevertheless I think that the trend is this way though it's nowhere close to an ironclad rule on any of these, petit bourgeois White Anglo-Saxon Protestants don't haggle over prices when planning a wedding. People of lower socioeconomic standing do, people of higher socioeconomic standing have agents that do it for them, and people of other ethnicities do because they don't have the cultural attitude that haggling is gauche.

> 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).

Ugh. Are many people really like this? I would never date, let alone marry someone who had this kind of attitude. It's so... wasteful. And stressful. I don't understand it at all.

Me neither. But I think it's at least one part of the cultural ritual of wedding. I mean, a rule like "the diamond should cost at least such and such" is not even conceivable outside this type of framework (consider that artificial diamonds are also a perfect substitute- and as perfectly useless as the "real" ones).

I don't have good references here, it's just observation. But think about it: all the process of the proposal, the engagement, the long planning, the event itself, the dozens of relatives and friends invited, the food and the party... it's heavily ritualized and designed as a public and expensive event. Of course, you can deviate from the script as much as you want. If anything (also pure observation, I might be wrong) it seems to become less extreme in cultures that value more careful planning against spontaneity and of, course, tradition: for example weddings in India are an incredibly expensive affair that can last for several days and have thousands of guests.[1]

Somehow the practice reminds me a bit of that of the potlatch [2], a ritualized exchange and destruction of goods that was meant as a display of wealth in some tribal societies (possibly also ancient Greece).

[1] https://medium.com/@rubychandu/the-nonsense-that-is-indian-w... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch

Sounds a lot like the satellite launch market before 2010.

Thankfully, since then there is a new baker on the block.

I don't think the two industries are at all comparable.

What if I want to have my wedding in low earth orbit?

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