Tuesday, November 11, 2008

A Futile Wedding Fight

Every bride in some part wants to be a frugal bride: get a deal on fabric for centerpieces, find your dress as part of someones sample sale, or be able to use your uncle as both officiant and DJ. And there are tons of books, websites, and lunatic ravings of women gone mad to tell you how to do just that.

But there is one entity in the wedding industry that no matter how much you scrimp and save you can never best. And even if they do not meet your expectations and requirements of the contract you make you cannot report them to any BBB.

I refer, of course, to the post office.

You are, according to every etiquette guide on earth, to send paper invitations through the mail, oh but that's not all. There are also those Save the Dates you've been working so hard on, and the shower invites. And you cannot forget about the thank yous for all those parties or Emily Post will stomp on your fingers with her hard riding boots.

I swear the post office must have some draconian deal with any writer about to talk about the proper way to send out invitations (or STD's, RSVP's, Reception cards, Thank You's, and any other way to contact your guests). It is required that everything have a stamp on it, even better if it has a couple. The internet is this evil thing that will suck the life out of both your wedding and marriage.

But everyone knows that stamps aren't that bad, just a little 42 cents for one of them. Oh, but that's right, you're inviting more than 10 people to your wedding. And you'd really like them to send back their RSVP's so they need stamps. Don't forget about all those thank you notes too.

So before you know it your nice simple wedding has raked in $150 for the post office without batting an eye and there isn't a single thing you can do about.

5 comments:

AmyJean {Relentless Bride®} said...

I love this post... and its so true. you think 42 cents no problem but before you know it, it adds up to well over 100 bucks, which is a big deal. Especially when some people don't use their response cards GRRR!!!

Rachel said...

So so true.
And you want to know what's even MORE annoying??? The people who still don't send back the RSVP's, and basically put that stamp to waste!!
I want my 42 cents back, dammit

bibliophibian said...

we're skipping the posted rsvps and instead putting a form on our website for people to click at. (this has the added advantage of making it easy for us to hassle them via email with polite reminders to spend 3 minutes doing so.) we're also ditching paper save-the-dates (no one did those 20 years ago, anyway) and instead sending save-the-date emails. i'm kind of stuck on the invitations, though. i can hand-deliver about a dozen of them. the rest? hah. and thank-you notes? if i get really lucky we might be able to skip stamping a quarter of them, but the rest must go into the mail. *sigh* at least i already have my american stamps from before we even got engaged. i wonder if they sell rolls of permanent-rate letter stamps in canada....

Linda said...

I know. Evil little empire aren't they?

MichelleB said...

Great post and its so true.

Ever since my boyfriend proposed to me with a gorgeous diamond engagement ring from www.idonowidont.com and got a good deal, we are looking at other ways to save some money.

We decided instead of sending invitations in the mail to go with some online invitations which helped with the budget.