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Comment by Udik | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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

> 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.

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