- Mead, Rebecca.
One Perfect Day.
New York: Penguin Press, 2007.
ISBN 1-59420-088-2.
-
This book does for for the wedding industry what Jessica Mitford's
The American Way of Death did for
that equally emotion-exploiting industry which preys upon the
other end of adult life. According to the American
Wedding Study, published annually by the Condé Nast
Bridal Group, the average cost of a wedding in the United States in
2006 was US$27,852. Now, as the author points out on p. 25,
this number, without any doubt, is overstated—it is compiled by
the publisher of three bridal magazines which has every incentive
to show the market they reach to be as large as possible, and is
based upon a survey of those already in contact in one way or another
with the wedding industry; those who skip all of the theatrics and
expense and simply go to City Hall or have a quiet ceremony with
close family at home or at the local church are “off the
radar” in a survey of this kind and would, if included,
bring down the average cost. Still, it's the only figure
available, and it is representative of what the wedding industry
manages to extract from those who engage (if I may use the word)
with it.
To folks who have a sense of the time value of money, this is
a stunning figure. The average age at which Americans marry
has been increasing for decades and now stands at around
26 years for women and 27 years for men. So let's take
US$27,000 and, instead of blowing it out on a wedding,
assume the couple uses it to open an investment account
at age 27, and that they simply leave the money in the
account to compound, depositing nothing more
until they retire at age 65. If the account has a compounded
rate of return of 10% per annum (which is comparable to the
long-term return of the U.S. stock market as a whole), then
at age 65, that US$27,000 will have grown to just a bit over
a million dollars—a pretty nice retirement nest egg
as the couple embarks upon their next big change of life,
especially since government
Ponzi scheme
retirement programs
are likely to have collapsed by then.
(The
OpenOffice
spreadsheet I used to make this calculation is
available
for downloading. It also allows you to forecast the
alternative of opting for an inexpensive education and
depositing the US$19,000 average student loan burden into
an account at age 21—that ends up yielding more than
1.2 million at age 65. The idea for this analysis came
from Richard
Russell's
“Rich
Man, Poor Man”, which is the single most lucid and important
document on lifetime financial planning I have ever read.) The
computation assumes the wedding costs are paid in cash by the couple
and/or their families. If they're funded by debt, the financial
consequences are even more dire, as the couple finds itself servicing
a debt in the very years where saving for retirement has the largest
ultimate payoff. Ever helpful, in this book we find the Bank of
America marketing home equity loans to finance wedding blow-outs.
So how do you manage to spend twenty-seven thousand bucks on a one day
party? Well, as the author documents, writing with a wry sense of
irony which never descends into snarkiness, the resourceful wedding
business makes it downright easy, and is continually inventing new
ways to extract even more money from their customers. We learn the
ways of the wedding planner, the bridal shop operator, the wedding
media, resorts, photographers and videographers, à la carte “multi-faith”
ministers, drive-through Las Vegas wedding chapels, and the bridal
apparel industry, including a fascinating look inside one of the
Chinese factories where “the product” is made. (Most
Chinese factory workers are paid on a piecework basis. So how do you
pay the person who removes the pins after lace has been sewed in
place? By the weight of pins removed—US$2 per
kilogram.)
With a majority of U.S. couples who marry already living
together, some having one or more children attending the
wedding, the ceremony and celebration, which once marked
a major rite of passage and change in status within the
community now means…precisely what? Well, not to
worry, because the wedding industry has any number of
“traditions” for sale to fill the void. The
author tracks down the origins of a number of them: the expensive
diamond engagement ring (invented by the N. W. Ayer advertising
agency in the 1930s for their client, De Beers), the Unity
Candle ceremony (apparently owing its popularity to
a television soap opera in the 1970s), and the “Apache
Indian Prayer”, a favourite of the culturally
eclectic, which was actually penned by a Hollywood
screenwriter for the 1950 film
Broken Arrow.
The bottom line (and this book is very much about that) is that in the
eyes of the wedding industry, and in the words of Condé Nast
executive Peter K. Hunsinger, the bride is not so much a princess
preparing for a magic day and embarking upon the lifetime adventure of
matrimony, but (p. 31) “kind of the ultimate consumer, the drunken
sailor. Everyone is trying to get to her.” There
is an index, but no source citations; you'll have to find
the background information on your own.
September 2007 