I really wish more commenters would take my tossed off posts and glean fascinating socio-economic insights from them. As instruction, Burrito Boy takes my post on price discrimination in the wedding industry and writes:
Ezra is actually making a much more serious point than the commentators seemingly imagine. The extremely widespread wedding-related price discrimination is simply not justified by neoclassical economic theory. The wedding industry is now a huge one, and limo driving and rental isn't precisely the hardest industry to get into. There are no massive barriers to entry. So, when a competitor openly announces that wedding-related limo use is xx% higher priced for ludicrous and valueless extras, and simply refuses to do wedding business at the lower price, why aren't other limo companies jumping in to take advantage of this?
Clearly, the higher wedding-related prices are far above that of supplier costs (the much lower non-wedding prices probably aren't that much above cost). Competitors should be lining around the block to undercut what is essentially unearned profit.......but, they aren't (in fact, after investigation, I'll bet you find that everybody's simply setting wedding prices to nearly equivalent levels). Again, something is really quite wrong with neoclassical economic theory here.
And Weboy says:
The real scandal here - pace Ezra's earlier comments on the Silve Palate - is the new sense of "classiness" that has people with no real business spending small fortunes on weddings doing it anyway. The wedding market is madness, but it's our nuptial obssessed culture making a fetish out of big, overstuffed ceremonies that's the bigger problem.
That's totally what I was getting at.
