Wedding business boom a short-term jolt to economy
Weddings haven’t returned to normal, but 2022 could equal 1980s levels.
Meg Van Dyke, who runs a Pittsburgh wedding planning company, spent a recent weeknight frantically calling photographers for a May wedding. All eight who fit her couple’s criteria were fully booked.
“I’ve never had a problem finding vendors before,” she said. “It’s absolutely booming.”
Weddings are roaring back after a pandemic-induced slump, leading to booked-up venues, a dearth of photographers and rising prices on catered dinners. As demand picks up, it’s providing an additional jolt of spending to the U.S. economy.
The race to the aisle is payback after a lost year of ceremonies. As lockdowns swept the nation, weddings slowed abruptly at the onset of the pandemic. Shane McMurray, founder of The Wedding Report, estimates that 1.3 million marriages took place in the United States last year, compared with the typical 2.1 million. Those were often “micro-weddings,” according to industry insiders, with just a handful of guests, if any were present at all.
That’s turning around sharply. Weddings have not quite returned to normal for 2021, but they are quickly rebounding, and McMurray forecasts that next year they will jump to the highest level since the 1980s as engaged couples who have waited out a pandemic finally tie the knot.
Once that pent-up demand plays out, he expects that long-running trends like cohabitation without marriage will come to dominate. Many economists agree. “My instinct, immediately, is: This is not a marriage boom; this is a wedding boom,” said Jessamyn Schaller, an economist at Claremont McKenna College in California.
She added that even with the short-term pop, there were likely to be fewer marriages than there would have been had the pandemic never happened.
In other words, the wedding boom is probably a blip.
Marriage rates have been dropping for decades and hit a record low of 6.1 per 1,000 people in 2019, down from 8.2 in 2000. The decline has come alongside a drop in fertility, which also hit a new low before the onset of the coronavirus.
What the wedding rebound could do is lay the groundwork for a brief post-pandemic baby bump, since couples often wait to exchange vows before they have children.
Lyman Stone, a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, tracks fertility intentions in surveys and keeps a close eye on statelevel birth data. A baby bust that took hold after the pandemic started appears to be turning around, much faster than expected.
“It is a rapid return to normal,” Stone said. The nascent wedding rush “probably means that we have a couple of years here where we have somewhat more positive fertility than was previously expected.”
Lest onlookers get too excited, Stone points out that what was expected was a slow decline in births.
And Melissa Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland, cautioned that the early signs of a fertility rebound could be a false signal, since the pandemic is still playing out and it will take time to see how birth trends shape up.
But Adam Ozimek, chief economist at the freelance-job site Upwork, thinks that many economists might be taking too dim of a view of the pandemic’s ability to put America on a different social trajectory. He hasn’t penciled in a big increase in marriage but does think that younger adults may change their ways in the wake of the crisis.
People have saved a lot of money during the pandemic, thanks to long months at home, a rising stock market and repeated checks from the government. Remote work and the shift toward more work from home have introduced new geographic flexibility for many young adults.
Millennials who had delayed homebuying, for instance, may now have an opening.
“That’s a pretty good recipe for stronger household formation,” Ozimek said, referring to what happens when adults move out on their own or in with partners rather than parents or, in some cases, roommates. “You can afford to buy your own house, start your own family.”
If that was to play out on any substantial scale, it would have big implications for the economy. Millennials are the nation’s largest generation. Any change in homeownership, marriage or fertility rates among this group would fuel spending on everything from outdoor grills and washing machines to day care.
But it will take years to see whether the pandemic marked some sort of turning point for American family life.
What is clear now is that it pushed back ceremonies, making for a shortterm spending boost on cakes, china, dresses, hair, makeup and photographers — a source of bottlenecks, but also a welcome recovery for some vendors who saw business drop precipitously amid lockdowns.