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Posts Tagged ‘weddings’

Paying More for the White Dress

In an article for The New York Times Magazine, Catherine Rampell  explores the “wedding markup.”  While planning her own wedding, Rampell was surprised by the lack of transparency in the wedding industry, even with all the wedding-related sites on the Internet:

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.

Many of the industry experts Rampell interviewed attributed the markup to the fact that brides are usually less-informed “first-time shoppers,” and also to the “once-in-a-lifetime logic”:


Getting Married? Then Get Ready for Price Discrimination

A reader named Elliot Millican writes in to say:

At one point in SuperFreakonomics you mentioned a particular brand of hair clippers that are offered for humans and for pets. You noted that the human clippers carried a higher price even though they appeared almost identical. You went on to say that the pricing scheme is a simple result of the consumer’s willingness to pay more for their clippers than they would their dog’s. [Yes indeed: this is known as price discrimination.]
These hair clippers reminded me of something I experienced when my wife and I were engaged (8 years ago). Let me quickly give the background: due to limited wedding budget, we had our wedding at church and a reception at the church with cake, punch, and light food. This allowed us to invite as many people as we wanted because the church was free and the cake/food prices weren’t terribly expensive. But we had a second reception just for family and wedding party at a hotel (for about 60 people). This second reception was more like your traditional wedding reception… open bar, sit-down dinner, and a DJ. In short, it was expensive, but affordable with only a fraction of the guest list.