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. "

It's hard to dis-intermediate insurance salespeople

 The WSJ has the story:

How Life Insurance Agents Beat Back a Tech Onslaught. Startups tried to bypass salespeople but now embrace them.  By Leslie Scism

"A decade ago, technology startups were planning to steamroll the stodgy life-insurance industry.

"They thought the glad-handing life-insurance agent who cornered customers at Little League games and closed deals at the kitchen table was a relic. Snazzy websites and sophisticated analytics would replace the one-on-one sales pitches and tedious application process that often involved a medical exam.

"The agents won the battle, and now the tech firms are courting them. Of seven startups that together raised more than $1.2 billion to sell life insurance directly to consumers, at least five now promote services to help agents sell policies, according to Coverager.com, which tracks so-called insurtech activity. One of the startups, five-year-old Sproutt, last month bought an insurance brokerage.

...

"Many of the tech firms now better appreciate an old industry adage: Life insurance is sold, not bought.

...

"Glenn Williams, president of life-insurance and financial-services firm Primerica Inc., said his company’s more than 135,000 full- and part-time agents are in people’s homes, “drinking your coffee, eating your brownies…getting the sale done.” 

Plasma and plasma products (such as antibodies) are a big business (and the U.S. dominates the international market)

These days I'm thinking about corona virus covid-19 convalescent blood plasma, which I blogged about yesterday, and about which I hope to say more soon. But that has gotten me to think again about blood plasma generally, which is a source of many therapies, including antibodies, immunoglobulins, that defend against a large variety of diseases.

The U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of blood plasma and plasma products, with both a large domestic commercial market and annual exports valued in the billions of dollars. The reason is largely that it is legal in the U.S. to pay plasma donors, so there's ample supply through a big network of hundreds of  for-profit and nonprofit blood and plasma centers (the nonprofits mostly don't pay donors, I think). In many countries, paying their residents for plasma is repugnant and illegal. Fortunately for their citizens, they mostly don't also suffer from severe shortages of life-saving plasma medicines, because it can be bought from the U.S. (See e.g. my posts on Canada's plasma policies.)

Here are some relevant export figures. They make clear that the U.S. exports billions of dollars of plasma, and tens of billions of dollars of plasma products.

For those who would like to study these data, let me explain where they come from.  (They  include some things that aren't plasma products, and may miss some that are...) It's not so easy to find the U.S exports of exactly blood plasma and plasma products (I needed some help).

In Chapter 30 of the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS),is the code:
HTS 3002: "Human blood; animal blood prepared for therapeutic, prophylactic or diagnostic uses; antisera, other blood fractions and immunological products, whether or not modified or obtained by means of biotechnological processes; vaccines, toxins, cultures of micro-organisms (excluding yeasts) and similar products:
 Antisera, other blood fractions and immunological products, whether or not modified or obtained by means of biotechnological processes"

That sounds good, but it includes (aside from plasma products) things that I don't want to include e.g. Malaria diagnostic test kits, and Fetal Bovine Serum.

On the other hand the subcategory 3002.12.00  is for "Antisera and other blood fractions" which includes sub-subcategories for things I do want to include:
3002.12.10 Human blood plasma.
3002.12.20 Normal human blood sera, whether or not freeze-dried
3002.12.30 Human immune blood sera

And then there are are codes 3002.13.00, 14.00, and 15.00 which cover the promising (very similar) categories in which most of the immunoglobulins are probably found, but maybe some other things too:

Immunological products, unmixed, not put up in measured doses or in forms or packings for retail sale
Immunological products, mixed, not put up in measured doses or in forms or packings for retail sale
and
 Immunological products, put up in measured doses or in forms or packings for retail sale.

The place to go to turn these numbers into export figures is dataweb.usitc.gov  (But getting data there isn't completely straightforward, and I got help from Julia Fabens.)  The table above shows that whole plasma itself has over $2 billion of annual exports from the U.S., and together with plasma products, including those involving antibodies (immunological products) there are almost $20 billion of exports from the U.S.

So, I'm guessing that soon, if clinical trials show that antibodies against covid-19, are useful, they will become readily available, commercially, in plasma and in pharmaceuticals.  A year ago, those human antibodies didn't exist, and so there was no way to use it to help patient zero or the next many thousands.  But now there's a lot of it, more each day, in the blood of recovered patients.  And there's a whole industry devoted to collecting it and purifying the antibodies into "immunological products." 

I hope human antibodies against covid-19 are clinically useful, to help mitigate and cure the disease if not to prevent it, because my sense is that a vaccine is (at least) many months away.

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