Summary
If the cost of a wedding were directly proportional to a couple's love for one another, Donald and Melania Trump would be the Romeo and Juliet of our time. Clearly something other than romance is driving the $161 billion wedding industry. In her new book, "One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding," New Yorker staff writer Rebecca Mead, a bitingly funny Englishwoman, reveals how lavish weddings thrive on our country's worst insecurities.
According to the Conde Nast Bridal Group, the average wedding in America cost $27,852 in 2006. That's seven and a half months of the average household's median annual income! Ms. Mead points out the statistic is one of the wedding industry's many sneaky tricks, "If a bride has been told, repeatedly, that it costs nearly $28,000 to have a wedding, then she starts to think that spending nearly $28,000 on a wedding is just one of those things a person has to do, like writing a rent check every month or paying health insurance premiums."See the full content of this document
Extract
Here Comes the Price Tag
For a bride-to-be the sky, not her bank account balance, is the limit. Parents who didn't buy their daughters ponies when they were young girls find themselves breaking out their checkbooks for every gilded or quilted trinket these now-grown women desire. And smart businesspersons t...
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