AHC: slow down the U.S. wedding industry?

I mean, people often spend what could be a down payment on a house or a rainy day fund for a period of unemployment. It’s not the greatest thing even for an upper middle-class family.

Make a lavish wedding more of the exception than the norm.
 
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Britain defeats the colonialists in the so-called War Of Independence. Americans never develop sublimated longings for the trappings of a fairytale monarchy.

(That's only half-serious, since I think Canada has as big a wedding industry as the USA, though I honestly don't know the numbers.)
 
The wedding industry caters to the narcissism of many younger women, & to the ego of the parents paying for it. Plus everyone enjoys a big party. Have much larger portion of the population in control of their egos, and of a more practical bent financially.
 

Kaze

Banned
One of the easiest ways would be remove the Church from the whole thing - instead make marriage solely a civil affair where you can only get married by handing a judge a fifty dollar bill.
 
One of the easiest ways would be remove the Church from the whole thing - instead make marriage solely a civil affair where you can only get married by handing a judge a fifty dollar bill.

There might still be lavish church ceremonies and receptions after going to the courthouse.

To prevent these, have American be Old Order Amish (wedding is very plain) or Stalinist (churches banned, typical wedding gift is extra bag of potatos).
 
Either significantly weaken feminism or significantly reduce income inequality/the culture of striving and "meritocracy" in the us.
 
I mean, people often spend what could be a down payment on a house or a rainy day fund for a period of unemployment. It’s not the greatest thing even for an upper middle-class family.

Make a lavish wedding more of the exception than the norm.
The 2009 crash is worse. Second Depression coupled with the rise of extremism abroad leading to numerous conflicts as Russia expands and China sees it's chance to seize the South China Sea and Taiwan while also expanding into Africa economically. Two new wars while still occupying Iraq/Afghanistan stretches the US militarily and economically. ISIS makes major gains due to aid from Iran, China, and Russia who cynically supply them to bleed the US. China and North Korea storm into South Korea which sees an American counterattack that frightens the North enough to attempt to use a nuclear warhead. The peninsula devolves into meatgrinder.

The need to return to conscription roils a generation who refuse to fight. Shortages become the norm. Riots in the US eventually worsen into a new civil war. That should curtail extravagant weddings a bit.
 
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Philip

Donor
One of the easiest ways would be remove the Church from the whole thing - instead make marriage solely a civil affair where you can only get married by handing a judge a fifty dollar bill.

You've never been to a princess wedding at Disney, have you?
 
Maybe if as few as three movies in the 1980s showed “cool” people having simple weddings. The ‘80s being the beginning of both upward mobility and income inequality.

PS In ‘93, I remember a co-worker at the photocopy center confided to me that his and his fiancé‘s relationship had gone somewhat downhill because all they did was wedding prep.
 
The 2009 crash is worse. Second Depression coupled with the rise of extremism abroad leading to numerous conflicts as Russia expands and China sees it's chance to seize the South China Sea and Taiwan while also expanding into Africa economically. Two new wars while still occupying Iraq/Afghanistan stretches the US militarily and economically. ISIS makes major gains due to aid from Iran, China, and Russia who cynically supply them to bleed the US. China and North Korea storm into South Korea which sees an American counterattack that frightens the North enough to attempt to use a nuclear warhead. The peninsula devolves into meatgrinder.

The need to return to conscription roils a generation who refuse to fight. Shortages become the norm. Riots in the US eventually worsen into a new civil war. That should curtail extravagant weddings a bit.

Dude. I think you have the next dystopian TL idea.

Also, to never get the wedding industry off the ground in the first place, there are plenty of economic clusterfucks available. A worse or prolonged Depression or a return to one after WWII. That or stagflation goes full-on depression in the ‘70s.
 
This is a lot like the Funeral Industry in this county, were they push thousand dollar plus coffins on the grieving with hundred dollar pillows for corpses. I'd rather be cremated and put in an old Mason Jar(so I can look out)
 
The 2009 crash is worse. Second Depression coupled with the rise of extremism abroad . . .
I go back and forth on whether our economy is resilient enough and large enough to handle a bubble of that size. I mean, do you actually need good governmental policy (read as, bailing out the banks!) or would the mere absence of bad policy have been enough?

In any case, I think both Pres. Bush and Pres. Obama deserve a lot of credit. But, no one gets credit for a bridge which doesn’t collapse, that’s just human nature. :p
 
Overblown weddings are a consequence of the propensity of late twentieth and early twenty first Americans to over-consume material goods in general.

There are two general ways to approach this. Keep late twentieth century and early twenty first century American culture intact, but it doesn't affect weddings. The way this happens is that the move away from traditional values in the 1960s is greater and more permanent than IOTL so that most people, including couples with children, just stop getting married. Those that do have formal weddings are religious people out of touch with mainstream culture and they keep their church weddings simple.

In this timeline, the money that is spent on weddings still gets spent, it just gets spent on something more ridiculous.

Alternatively, you can stop the consumer culture and the wedding aspect goes away, but this has big effects. You can do anything in this regard from going back to the colonial period to tinker with the culture, stop or change the New Deal so consumer spending is not the way to get out of the Great Depression, keeping the USA out of World Wars I and II so the US does not become the great superpower (plus keeping the USA out of World War I or preventing it probably also prevents the Great Depression in the first place, as well as the "roaring 20s"), stop the Baby Boom from happening, which stopping US participation in World War 2 accomplishes, or for a last minute POD the more anti-materialist aspects of the culture culture of the 1970s gain more traction and are not reversed.
 
One of the easiest ways would be remove the Church from the whole thing - instead make marriage solely a civil affair where you can only get married by handing a judge a fifty dollar bill.
That's debateable. While a church wedding is obviously a time for public celebration and the wealthy would always of course have more lavish celebrations, historically weddings were usually a time when the couple would get the money and material goods. Prior to the late Victorian Era most people would simply get married in their Sunday church clothes - certainly not work clothes, but something that would see eegular use. Basically the rise of consumer culture, starting in the late Victorian Era and becoming ubiquitous with postwar prosperity created a mass wedding industry.
 
I mean, people often spend what could be a down payment on a house or a rainy day fund for a period of unemployment. It’s not the greatest thing even for an upper middle-class family.

Make a lavish wedding more of the exception than the norm.

The easiest way to do this is have some sort of authoritarian communist revolution in the US à la Sowjet Union style of communism
 
A lot of the details of modern weddings, such as the dress, the maids, the music and so on, actually originated from Queen Victoria's own wedding. Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries made no small effort to mimic these grandiose affairs. Simply changing it so this wedding is seen as vulgar and ostentatious, rather than beautiful and desirable, seems to be fairly easy.

It seems even worse when you remember that white cloth, as used in the dress, and white sugar, like was used for the icing, were incredibly expensive at this time.
 
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