Making Financial Headlines · Page 6
Wedding Cake Faces Competition From Cake
· New York time
About a third of couples are willing to save money on wedding cake and dessert, according to wedding-planning site Zola. NPR reports that grocery store cake is among the alternatives as couples confront the expense of a wedding. The choice exposes an unusually clear distinction between a product and its ceremonial job. Cake must taste good and feed guests. Wedding cake is also expected to participate in photographs, symbolize the occasion and somehow explain why dessert now requires a strategic budget discussion. Spending less on that category does not make the celebration less meaningful. It means couples are deciding which elements deserve scarce money and which can perform perfectly well without a luxury introduction. The frosting has not been asked to prove its emotional credentials at checkout. Imagine a supermarket cake arriving at a reception and discovering that everyone expects it to have a personal brand. It thought it was there to be sliced. Weddings contain many purchases whose importance is partly social. Couples willing to reconsider dessert spending are challenging one part of that inherited script. Once a cake is allowed to concentrate on feeding the guests, it can stop pretending to be a small edible monument to household creditworthiness.
Read this story in the full newspaper →Satire. Not factual reporting. Read the original reporting from the linked publishers.