A Couple Supposedly Offered Wedding Guests Better Menu Depending On Price Of Their Gift

Jul 20, 2021 by apost team

Getting married is a magical experience for the couple and their wedding party guests. The happy couple has a lot to plan to help make their big day as perfect as possible, from picking out the perfect flower arrangements to creating a menu that is sure to satisfy their own taste buds. With such a milestone moment to celebrate, most couples opt on having their friends and family join them in celebrating their love to one another and go all out for the ceremony and reception on their special day.

It’s no secret that weddings can be extremely expensive, and sometimes the couple needs to find new ways to budget and even get their wedding party to help chip in a bit. For one undisclosed couple, they seem to have decided to add some food options to their wedding RSVP invitations, and the menu was a bit surprising to the wedding guests. Rather than simply asking what everyone wanted to eat that night, the couple presumably required that their guests pick their food option based on the price of the gift that the guest was planning on giving the soon-to-be newlyweds.

The RSVP ticket made its way to social media and led many people to wonder just what exactly the couple’s end game was with their detailed meal-for-gift tradeoff. The more expensive the gift was, the better the meal at the reception would be. While some people thought it might have been a joke, others were quick to chime in with their own thoughts on how they would handle the situation if they were invited to the wedding.

While it’s common for some couples to go a bit overboard with their wedding demands, many people were not too thrilled about this couple’s RSVP wedding invitations demanding extravagant gifts for a nice meal. A photo of the invitation was uploaded to the Wedding Shaming subreddit on Reddit in September 2020. The price range started high and only escalated as the menu progressed. 

Gifts worth up to $250 were classified in the Loving Gift category, earning the guests meals such as roasted chicken and swordfish. Moving up to the Silver Gift category with the price capped at $500, guests who gave a gift costing this amount would be served poached salmon for dinner at the wedding. 

The price range of $501 to $1,000 was deemed as the Golden Gift section, earning guests choices such as filet mignon or lobster tails. The fourth and final tier called Platinum Gift offered two-pound lobsters with an added souvenir champagne goblet. The couple was also sure to make any guests with food or diet restrictions pay up for their preferred or needed meals. The RSVP ticket detailed that vegetarian and kosher meals would be available only at the Platinum Gift level.

Perplexed by the audacity of the couple to ask for such pricey gifts in return for a nice dinner, plenty of Reddit users expressed their frustration with the wedding invite. One user wrote, “That is horrific. My response would be zero and I will bring McDonald’s,” as per the Mirror. Another user explained what could be done in place of spending that much money on a gift. “For $2,000, I can fly to Ireland, stay a week, and buy a Waterford flute…” the user wrote.

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Although some users argued that the photo in question was likely from a charity fundraiser — a context in which it would make more sense to provide different dinner options based on donation amounts — another commenter seems to have found the photo’s source, the Jersey Bride blog.

“So here’s something funny. Here’s a for-real legit RSVP card I saw last year (sorry for the bad resolution, I took the pic on my cell),” the blogger wrote above the photo in question.

“After this started getting gossiped about (and posted on FB), the couple who sent this out with their wedding invitations said it was a joke, and they were surprised no one ‘got’ the joke,” the blogger continued.

The controversy surrounding the menu isn’t surprising given that wedding gifts — and how much guests should spend on them — is a divisive topic. In an entire piece dedicated to gift-giving at weddings, Vogue reports that a study from American Express found that the average wedding gift was usually around $99 for friends of the couple and $127 for family members.

"The formality of the wedding impacts a number of elements, including time of day and dress, but there is no tie into the cost of the gift. What you gift the couple should be exclusively dependent on your relationship to the happy couple, as well as your own means. No guest should feel as though they need to overextend themselves with the gift because they are expected to wear black tie," says Kylie Carlson, the CEO of the International Academy of Wedding & Event Planning.

What do you think about this couple’s pricey RSVP ticket? Let us know, and be sure to pass this along to your loved ones, too!