It’s the Economy: The Wedding Fix Is In

Illustration by Kelsey Dake

I was never the type to create a wedding "dream board," with collages of petal-strewn, princess-themed fantasy nuptials. So I thought the process of planning my own wedding would be fairly painless and practical. That was before I entered the economically baffling world of the wedding-industrial complex.

Deep thoughts this week:

1. The wedding industry thrives on informational asymmetry.

2. Meaning consumers are gouged.

3. Pricing transparency may bring costs down.

4. But probably not.

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I knew, of course, that weddings are notoriously expensive, but what I did not expect was the sheer difficulty of finding any price information at all. Not only will vendors not post prices online, but many will not even quote them over the phone, requiring a face-to-face meeting first. In fact, before they would even show me any of their dresses, let alone price tags, some bridal shops have required me to fill out a form divulging my occupation, employer, address, dress budget, overall wedding budget, reception venue and other intrusive information.

Wedding vendors seemed to be trying to size me up to figure out how much I'm willing to pay; consumer advocates say this is a common practice, as is charging more for a given service for a wedding than for a "family function" or "corporate event." Austan Goolsbee, an economics professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, recalls that when he was married over a decade ago, one caterer initially quoted him about $60 a head, and then jacked up the price to about $90 per person after realizing the function was a wedding. These are forms of what economists call price discrimination; it sounds unfair, but it's perfectly legal, and it's easier to get away with in markets where there's little price transparency and consumers are relatively uninformed.

When the Internet came along, it transformed industries like air travel, bookselling and even life insurance, by massively reducing search costs (essentially, the difficulty of comparison shopping), thereby pushing down prices. It seems as if the $50 billion wedding industry — in which the average couple spends upward of $25,000, according to the market-research firms IBISWorld and The Wedding Report — should be ripe for similar "disruption." But while there are plenty of wedding-related websites, they typically work like dream boards, rarely including specific prices. Why hasn't some enterprising Silicon Valley firm come in and made the market more transparent?

I spoke with a lot of wedding industry veterans, as well as economists who study other markets where consumers frequently feel gouged, thanks to high search costs and informational asymmetries (health care, funerals). They told me the wedding industry's dysfunction is a product of its highly bespoke services — and, as a result, greater transparency might not bring down prices anyway.

David M. Wood, president of the Association of Bridal Consultants, said part of the problem is that most brides are first-time shoppers. They are less informed about what a "fair" price is, or how long it should take to discover prices. (If you just spent two hours going through different bouquet and centerpiece pricing options at one florist, you might assume that it will take the same amount of time at other vendors and decide it's too much of a hassle to shop around.) Because this event is (ideally) once in a lifetime, that also means that vendors can appeal to consumers' sentimentality, urging them not to cheap out on the "most important" day of their lives. Because of similar concerns about guilt-tripping salespeople, the Federal Trade Commission requires funeral homes to provide its bereaved customers with an itemized price list.

Many in the wedding industry wielded this once-in-a-lifetime logic, explaining to me that wedding services are not standardized enough to create a meaningful price aggregator. With books, there's a single bar code for each product, but it's hard to do apples-to-apples pricing comparisons between wedding bands or photographers. This argument isn't incredibly compelling. After all, I can see prices for highly differentiated food-delivery options on sites like Seamless. Locality, a start-up, has been collecting and publishing a menu of prices for services usually considered highly nonstandardized, like massages, day care and dentist visits. Creating something similar for wedding services should not be insurmountably difficult.

Catherine Rampell is an economics reporter for The Times. Adam Davidson is off this week.

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