“I worked as a wedding planner and coordinator, and one bride stands out to me because she was so inconsistent with all the vendors. She was a sweetheart to me during the planning phase and I never saw any of the crazy until the day of the wedding. It was honestly like a Jekyll/Hyde situation.
She wanted a big wedding, around 300 people, and spent a lot of money on the venue and food and wanted the best for everything. No complaints about paying for it either, never asked for discounts or anything like that. And since she wanted the best and seemed to have a large budget, I referred her to a popular baker for the cake. I let her handle the logistics for the cake since I’ve worked with this baker before and never had any problems. I figured they would do the standard cake tasting, pick a design with the baker, and I would see a gorgeous masterpiece on the day of the wedding.
Well, that didn’t really work out. For some reason, she didn’t want to tell the baker that it was for a wedding. I’m guessing she read that you can save money by ordering a regular cake because some vendors will automatically add an extra charge if it’s for a wedding. She decided she didn’t want to pay for a wedding cake, so she told the baker it was for a birthday party. The baker asked how many people the cake would need to serve and she said ‘around 50.’ She also didn’t want to pay the delivery fee, so she had her sister pick up the cake on the morning of the wedding and bring it to the event.
At this point, it’s important to mention we live in Texas and this was a summer wedding. By the time the cake got to the venue (about six hours after it was picked up from the bakery), it didn’t look all that great anymore. Some of the decorations had melted, the cake got a little banged up in the car ride and there was icing on the inside of the box, the entire cake was sagging on one side. It was also way too small for a wedding of her size. I saw it and it looked like a complete disaster. But at this point, we were about an hour away from the start of the wedding and there was no possible way to fix this.
The bride came into the reception room with her makeup all done and saw the cake and completely flipped out. Screaming, crying, throwing things, collapsing on the floor. Complete meltdown. She threatened to cancel the whole wedding if we couldn’t fix it. We tried to calm her down as much as we could and grabbed the makeup artist before she left and asked if she could help fix the bride’s makeup, which was a mess at this point.
The bride saw herself in the mirror and had another meltdown because she ruined her hair and makeup and now wanted to have the whole thing re-done. After she got everything done to perfection again, we were about an hour behind schedule. I let the guests come inside the reception room to wait because it seemed cruel to force everyone to sit outside in 100-degree heat, but when she saw everyone was inside, she had another meltdown. She spent the entire wedding sulking with a scowl on her face and refused to take any pictures with people. Her new husband kept coming over to hug her and try to cheer her up and she would either yell at him or give him the silent treatment. Most of the guests left very early because the atmosphere felt so uncomfortable.
It was pretty much a waste of the $200,000 budget for a lavish wedding, all because she wanted to save a couple of hundred bucks on the cake.”
