Showing posts with label marriage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marriage. Show all posts

Monday, April 7, 2025

After the proposal: the market for weddings

Weddings are a big business. So is the business of matching brides to wedding service providers.  But there are a lot of vendors with complaints about the Knot, the biggest matchmaker of brides and service providers.

 The New Yorker has the story:

Does the Knot Have a “Fake Brides” Problem?
The popular wedding website helps d.j.s, caterers, and florists find spouses-to-be. Some venders say they’re finding something else
.  By Adam Iscoe

" In addition to hosting gift registries and wedding websites, and offering reception ideas and relationship advice (“What to Know About Walmart Wedding Cakes,” “How to Prepare for Sex on Your Wedding Night,” “Dislike Your Spouse’s Last Name? Here’s What to Do”), the Knot is used by millions of couples to find their wedding venders, who pay to advertise on it. 

...

"Each year, Americans drop roughly seventy billion dollars hosting weddings. Most people think that this is too much—that couples are overspending, that venders are overcharging, and that the wedding-industrial complex verges on unethical.

...

" running a wedding business is especially tough: there are hundreds of thousands of competitors; costs are rising, owing in part to inflation; and, for many venders, bookings and budgets have decreased by about twenty-five per cent. According to a recent industry survey, a third of all wedding venders said that they are doing poorer financially than they were a year ago. “Florists are the worst,” McIntosh said. “There are so many broke florists.”

...

"Last year, the Knot facilitated four billion dollars in consumer spending via advertising on its platforms. Most of the company’s revenue comes not from brides and grooms but from wedding venders. Nine hundred thousand venders in more than ten countries use the Knot, and many pay to be advertised to couples—“leads,” in industry parlance—seeking their services. "


Friday, February 14, 2025

Matchmaking on campus with Marriage Pact

 Happy Valentine's Day:)

Here's a story from the Amherst Student (the student newspaper), about an annual event on many campuses that started at Stanford.

True Love or True Disappointment? Students Reflect on the 2024 Marriage Pact by Savita Jani and Erin Sullivan

"With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, love is on the brain for many Amherst students. But Cupid isn’t just around on Feb. 14 — back in September, over 1,200 Mammoths sought romance through the Marriage Pact, an online questionnaire that matches students with their most statistically compatible partner on campus.

"At Amherst, the Association of Amherst Students (AAS) contracts with the Marriage Pact company, a sizable operation available at 100 schools across the country. Marriage Pact has served over 570,000 participants and made over 285,000 matches since its founding. It uses its own algorithm that takes psychology, “market design,” and linear algebra into account in order to find students their ideal match: a perfectly compatible other half whom they can one day marry (if they don’t find someone else).

"Marriage Pact also claims to address the nuances of romance by recognizing when similar values are necessary for a good match and when they aren’t. According to their website, 3-4% of Marriage Pact matches date for a year or longer. But how well has the Marriage Pact worked for Amherst students?

"To answer this question, we interviewed several Mammoths and collected responses from 54 respondents through an anonymous Google Form survey.


 

Here are my previous posts on the Marriage Pact.