Platinum Brides: If you're so rich why are you so dumb?

Posted Sunday, January 24, 2010 7:30 PM

I hate to be a hater, but since I am in the middle of wedding planning myself, I do like to watch the junk tv shows the bridal industry likes to put out in order to dupe women into thinking that spending a gazillion dollars on their weddings will somehow make them a happier, better and a more fulfilled human being.  

Why? Because it's all a bunch of gilded bullsh*t.  I could actually do more with real cow droppings than some of the stuff they put on shows like these. I could take manure and put it all over my garden and grow lots of pretty flowers, whereas all these shows are nothing but a bunch of baloney that isn't good for eating.

 Here are 5 logical reasons why Platinum Weddings does not portray anything remotely realistic, even if we are talking about couples with a gazillion dollars to spend.

1. Virtually all of the shows have their brides pick out their cake like 1 week at the earliest before the wedding.

If you're a real bride, you're bs meter should be going off.  I mean this seriously.  What kind of clueless idiot gives their baker less than a week notice for their wedding cake?  How many bakers are actually willing to work on that timetable without a horrendous mark up?  I don't care if you have one dollar to spend or a million dollars to spend.  Let's just assume the baker can get XYZ cake that you ordered even if you paid as much as three times the cost just because you ordered it at the last minute like a dingbat.  What's the likelihood that given that short timetable they are going to mess something up?  The probability is much higher with that kind of short notice.  Think about it.  If someone gave you a complicated and intricate task with a deadline that is supposed to be done in less than a 1/3 of the time wouldn't you be more likely to make a mistake?  Not exactly condusive to a perfect platinum wedding is it?

More like it's unrealistic and just plain old dumb.

2. Virtually all the episodes have their brides see their flower mock ups two days before the wedding.

Excuse me???!!  Brides, newsflash: your florist orders your flowers from the importer about 2 weeks before your wedding.  Two days before your wedding, if you see your flowers and you don't like them, there is little if anything that florist can do about it.  There isn't a snow ball's chance in hell that when the couple went in, they were seeing their first mock up.   It's totally and completely unrealistic, and if it is true the rich couple looks even more idiotic if they change their minds.

3. Pointless repetitive non-sense: florists gushing about how each flower was imported from a different country.  

In almost every episode I watch they cut to the scene where this ridiculously festive and out to lunch person talks about "the Vandela Roses were imported from Ecuador and the Hydrangeas were imported from Holland."

Here's a little dose of reality: almost all the flowers sold in the retail industry are imported.  The same flowers you buy in the supermarket are the same flowers you bought from Joe Schmoe in the super tight latex pants.

Yeah, your flowers are just as special as if you would have gone to the grocery store and bought them there. But you just paid twice as much for the guy in the pants, and you don't even get to wear them.

4.  Retail Mark up. Whenever you buy flowers from a florist you are paying a retail mark up.  So all those couples who pay $40,000 to $75,000 worth of flowers are actually only getting roughly $20,000 to $38,000 worth of flowers at the most, if they are lucky.  What's that like in real life, ladies?  Going to the Mercedes dealer and driving out with a Toyota[not to mention a big fat dunce hat that should be nailed to your forehead].

Looks pretty dumb on paper doesn't it?

The one couple in particular that I am going to pick on is Andrea and Glen found here:

http://www.wetv.com/platinum-weddings/episodes/andrea-and-glenn

On the show Andrea's bouquet was quoted as costing $1200.00  Yes, that's what they claimed it would cost.  It was this dinky little nosegay with black magic roses and cymbidiums.  It must have had like 12 black magic roses and maybe like 10 cymbidium orchids in it at max.  The bouquet also had some filler of some kind and lots of rhinestones.  

Let's do some math here:

Industry cost of a rose per stem is $0.80 per stem.  So her roses were like $9.60.  Industry cost of a cymbidium blossom is roughly $3.00 per blossom, although they are around $14 per spray with approximately 10 to 12 blossoms per spray.  Let's say for fun the florist paid $3 per stem.  Let's also assume for fun that those cheap looking rhinestones were $25.00 total.  So we're looking at a bouquet that cost approximately  $64.60 to make being marked up to $1200.00.  For those of you that know some math that's roughly a 1,850% mark up in price.  That's approximately 1,750% over industry standard recommended mark up.

And this couple paid for it.  

5. The divorce statistics on marriage are the same no matter how much money you spend on your wedding.  So you're chances being a platinum bride and getting a divorce are about the same as the gal who got married by Elvis at a drive-through wedding chapel in Vegas with change she dug up in the cushions of her couch.  But when you consider that conflict over money is considered to be one of the primary causes of marital strife ending in divorce in the United States, a big 6 or 7 figure bill at the start of your life with your significant other can't exactly be guaranteed ticket to sweet marital bliss the wedding industry likes to paint it as.

Again I hate to be a hater. The old adage goes "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"  I am going to echo the famous words of the Laureate Paul Samuelson "If you're so rich, how come you're so dumb?"

Chances are you won't rich for too much longer if you're going to throw you're money away like it's going out of style.

 Better a smart bride with two cents in her pocket than a platinum bride with a million dollars spent and not one single brain cell in her head.