Empirical Costs of Weddings

Curiosity kind of got the best of me last night and I had a choice to go out to the bars wherein I'd run into the same ol same ol "Tanya" who majored in "child psychology" and likes to "partay" and watches "Teen Idol" not to mention the Ambercrombie and Fitch Frat Boys with their hats on backwards getting ecstatic or borderline suicidally depressed if some guy they have no relation to scored a goal or not on the TV or...

look up the historic costs of weddings.

Sadly the Federal Reserve does not have this data series in their FRED database, but I kind of poached a couple numbers to make for a somewhat decent chart. I only had about 7 datapoints and just averaged them over the period of time to the next datapoint to fill in the chart, but you get the idea;


$28,600.

Seriously, you know, could you maybe put your kid through college instead? I'm serious, this is just more proof it's all about "them" and nothing about the kids.

$28,600???

And understand 90% of that is for fluff. If you think about the actual wedding it should be about two people; the husband and the wife. Loved ones, be they friends or family should be there too, but this BS where I saw $500 wedding cakes and $2,000 dresses, and limo service and so forth. Here's a screenshot from a web site that shows all the various amenities (though some would claim "requirements" of a wedding);

You add all this unnecessary crap up and no wonder you're blowing through two kid's worth of college tuition in a day. It's all about the show, the bigger the better, the fancier. My feathers are more colorful than yours, my chest is poofier than yours. Forget what the marriage was supposed to be for like "love", no, it's starting to seem to me to be a bragfest. I'll put another chart here, though I have no data, this is just my impression that I got as I was reading through all these sites



Seriously, if I do get married, I'm eloping. None of this limo, free drinks, rent out the Hilton or "horse drawn carriage crap" (I did that once, not get married, but took a girl out on a horse drawn carriage ride, back when I was young and foolish had some notions of chivalry and hope, wasted $85 for 45 minutes, and then the next two dates got the flaking out at the last minute thing, and that was just $85, I can only imagine what they'd charge you for a wedding).

That's another thing, what's the mark up on a wedding. That's the business to be in. I teach dance on the side, the few weddings I've done it's amazing how little they care about price. And there's a time factor there too. They don't want a full hour of lessons, they just want 15 minutes, and then you get the ef off the floor and let the bride and groom do the dance while nobody really learned any real dancing as it's impossible to teach anything in 15 minutes. But for 15 minutes work you can earn about $100. Again, they're not paying for actual dance lessons, thereby implying people would learn to dance, they are paying for the right to brag they had a dance lesson.

Eh, maybe I'm just overthinking the cost of weddings, being too economic. I should realize it's all about love and money isn't an issue...

until of course financial problems arise...

which is a major contributing factor to divorce.