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"Hello?"
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"I'm, uh, planning a wedding for next spring."
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"Quick quote on a venue for a family gathering."
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"Between 120 and 130 guests."
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"For 125 people."
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"We're aiming for April 16th."
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"The 16th."
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"That's gonna be a $15,000 food and beverage minimum."
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"The food and beverage minimum is gonna be $17,000."
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"OK."
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This 2,000 dollar difference is what's known as the "wedding mark-up" where some vendors charge a higher price for weddings than for other similar parties.
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So why are weddings so expensive?
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The wedding website "The Knot" surveyed thousands of its members and found that the average cost of their weddings was thirty-one thousand dollars last year.
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That's not including honeymoon.
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Wedding dresses average at thirteen hundred dollars and catering comes in at $68 dollars per person.
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And those numbers are a lot higher if you live in places like New York, Chicago, DC or San Francisco.
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The wedding industry is kinda weird and it's an industry that I have quite a bit of experience in.
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My wife Isabel and I run a wedding videography business in Washington DC and here's my take on why weddings are so expensive.
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There's this economic concept called asymmetric information.
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With most things you buy you have a pretty good gage in what you're getting for what you pay for.
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You're pretty sure that an 8 dollar avocado is way too much because you've bought avocados before.
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Familiarity with a market produces balanced information between buyers and sellers and so they can settle on a fair price.
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This is like Economics 101.
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But most people shopping for wedding stuff have very little, if any, experience with what they're buying.
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Cake, dress, napkins, catering, venues, flowers.
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This is stuff you just don't buy very often so you don't have a very good gage on what you should be paying.
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This is made a lot harder by the fact that us wedding vendors have a hard time posting prices on our website.
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You usually have to reach out and inquire to get any sort of pricing information.
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Imagine if you had to ask for pricing for every item in the grocery store.
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Shopping would be a lot harder.
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When I first was starting up my business, I read a ton of blogs about marketing to prospective clients.
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And overwhelming message that I kept reading is "steer away from talking about price".
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"We've put together a free report that shows you how to answer the "price question" with those email leads in a way that shift them away from price quickly so you can get them on the phone or to a meeting where you can book them!"
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And then there's Pinterest.
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Pinterest can be really useful I think using it as a starting point.
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It's an amazing tool for wedding inspiration or if you have an experienced wedding planner by your side, but usually doesn't help with the price question.
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And you see all these like amazing dresses and you can click on it to like get more information.
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You're gonna get a lot more pictures , but you're not gonna find any pricing information.
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And of course, there's always the option to "repin" it if you'd like to.
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If you are like a normal person with on a budget like you're setting yourself up to be let down.
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Another thing that makes wedding so expensive is the once-in-a-lifetime mentality.
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The classic line for brides shopping for a wedding dress is.
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It's the dress of your life, and if there's ever a one picture your ancestors have of you, it's the one in your wedding dress."
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That's wedding dress designer Anne Barge talking on the plan of money.
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I'm as guilty as anyone of this.
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Here's one of our very first ads.
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It's all about that once-in-a-lifetime feel.
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It's just really hard not to splurge when you put so much weight into one day.
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It's easy to look at this and think there's no doubt that wedding vendors are ripping off their clients.
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But there's another side to the story that I think is important to mention.
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Corporate flowers for example.
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There's probably going to be direction but maybe there's a little bit more flexibility where as a bride has dreamt up a certain flowers and she has been pinning it.
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And she wants to talk to the florist multiple times about the bouquet and the ribbon treatment, and the fact that her grandmother's broach is gonna be on that bouquet.
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It's a lot of time and energy spent on those flowers and that's gonna be reflected in the cost.
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The upshot of this is that the emotional weight of weddings usually means more work for vendors, and thus higher prices.
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And the most demanding clients are the ones that set the prices for everyone.
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So the best thing you can do to avoid being swindled is to demand the price range before hearing a sales pitch.
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We vendors might hate it but it's the fair thing to do.