Weddings in the time of coronavirus: Lockdowns leave couples and the $78B industry in the US devastated
If not altogether foreseeable, an understandable side-effect of the global lockdown that has ensued in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic has been the cancellation of wedding plans. When cities, states and countries are on lockdown, it’s really difficult to organize a wedding; not to mention dangerous. Community transmission of the disease only needs a small venue full of people coming into close contact with each other.
‘Empire’ actor Taraji P. Henson and fiancé Kelvin Hayden, a former-NFL player, recently postponed their nuptials. “It’s probably going to be more like July. We have to see what this will be like at the other end,” Henson said. “Our grandparents, my grandmother is about to turn 96, his is 86, how do we get them to the wedding now? Now, we are concerned, just trying to figure out the safest and best way.”
Henson isn’t the only celebrity to take the decision to delay saying “I do”. Earlier this month, actor Emma Stone and her longtime boyfriend-fiancé Dave McCary postponed their wedding too.
And while it is easy for the Hollywood rich to tweak their plans, for many, the wedding day is an expensive affair -- Bloomberg estimates the average cost of a wedding in 2020 is $24,675 -- and canceling or postponing that is a tough decision.
The Guardian reported that the U.S. had an estimated 450,000 weddings slated for March through May. Many have had to be canceled. More still remain uncertain of the future. For the $78 billion wedding industry in the U.S., the March 15 advisory from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention against gatherings of 50 people or more for the subsequent eight weeks came as a sort of death-knell. The report further added that this spate of cancellations and postponements has proved disastrous for the 1.2 million people and the nearly 400,000 businesses that are part of the wedding industry.
Victoria Hogan, who runs Flora Pop, a Las Vegas-based “pop-up wedding” business that stages nuptials in the surrounding desert landscapes, told Bloomberg, “I feel like eloping is going to be very in vogue, in a sense, because it’s already the affordable option.” But it’s not just the industry. People have been devastated at the prospect of postponing or canceling this special day in their lives.
CNBC spoke to Ari Ben-Avram and Esther Gutierrez, who planned to host their dream wedding on March 21, 2020, in Brooklyn, New York. Of course, they had to call it off. “We cried, hugged, sat in silence, drank beers and cried some more,” Gutierrez said. “We went to bed that night heartbroken.” The couple is just one of the many who have had to take this tough call.
Some have found hacks around this lockdown. 23-year-old student Eliana Amrami and 22-year-old Elliot Birn did get married. But for the Orthodox Jews, the ceremony was slightly unorthodox. They got married in their backyard. Their families attended the wedding through Zoom, as did the Rabbi. It was a success. “Before the wedding, I was so upset,” Amrami said. “I couldn’t believe this was my life. Now I don’t regret it. It was so much better than I could have imagined.”
Based on surveys, Shane McMurray, founder of the Wedding Report, estimated that 6.5 percent of couples were canceling their weddings, 28 percent were trying to shift their dates to later in 2020, 22.5 percent were postponing to 2021, and 43 percent had no plans to do anything yet. “Obviously, April and May will be pretty dismal,” he told Bloomberg. “This year we’ll likely lose between 25 percent-30 percent of weddings.”
Yes, weddings are the antithesis of social-distancing. But the devastating effect the coronavirus has had on both these participants and those that run the industry is just another example of how the disease has disrupted lives across the globe. One only hopes that those who postponed their dates are not forced to do so again.