The last form of legal extortion?

Weddings are a billion dollar business. This is no surprise. It seems that people can sell anything to a girl for her “special day” and brides are the most profitable market for retailers in the world. Yet in my experience there is one piece of this business that I find appalling: the wedding cake. In our quest for cakes we stumbled upon some of the worst scams imaginable. One store in particular handed me a menu of all the cake and filling flavours available, a long list. On the second page of the pamphlet it listed prices for cakes by size ranging from $20-$50 per cake. On display were tiered wedding cakes consisting of various sizes stacked on top of each other. A 12-inch cake topped by a 10-inch and an 8-inch looked just right to me. I added the numbers (my specialty): $40 + $30 +$20 = $90. Plus I assumed some decorating and delivery charges on top of this amount. I looked at the price tag on the display cake and gaped: $550 not including decoration or delivery. How could there be a $460 price difference? Was it just that the word “wedding” was included before the word “cake,” or was there more to it than that? Not one to shy away from conflict, and to give the shop the benefit of the doubt, I politely asked, “could you please explain why there is such a difference in price from your cake menu to the wedding cakes displayed?” I was then told with (I kid you not) annoyance that, “there is a lot more thought and planning that go into a wedding cake” and that I wouldn’t want a simple birthday cake that was just “slapped together.” Needless to say I was appalled by this and left the shop without purchasing anything. I can’t help but wonder… did our quest for cakes uncover something illegal or just unsavory?