Apparently the wedding industry provides amazingly bad customer service. If you are considering starting your own business you should consider doing something wedding related; if all you do is provide good customer service you will beat out your competitors. If you are considering having a wedding you should elope. With very rare exceptions every step of wedding planning has been a problem. Here are some examples:

Wedding cake - The wedding cake was one of the first things we tackled. After trying cakes at a bridal showcase at the fairgrounds Stephanie decided we should go with The Sugar Shop because they had the tastiest cakes...even though they are an hour away in Maxwell. So we headed out to Maxwell picked out a cake and thought we had a first major wedding task completed. Over the next few months our repeated calls and emails to clarify details on cake toppers and cake size were ignored. Then ~5 weeks from the wedding date we get a call that our order had been canceled. They claimed they had not received the deposit we sent, and rather than contact us to find out where it was (let alone reply to our messages) they booked someone else for our date. With time running out we went to Upper Crust and so far they have been great.

Wedding dress - The only problem bigger than the cake fiasco is the wedding dress. After much searching Stephanie found a dress she liked at Suzanne's Bridal. The customer service at Suzanne's was bad from the start. I have been in a couple times with Stephanie since she ordered her dress and I can attest that almost all of the employees are rude. Both times I've been in there we stood at the counter for about ten minutes before anyone even acknowledged our existence. It only went downhill from there. Stephanie ordered her dress about six months ago. It was supposed to arrive about three months ago. About three months ago she started calling Suzanne's a couple times a week to find out when her dress would arrive. They strung her along, telling her that her dress would be there any day, that was being over-nighted, and various other bull shit until this Monday (12 days until the wedding) when they finally conceded to Stephanie's Mom that the dress isn't coming. During the whole ordeal they continued to be rude and they have never explained what happened to the dress. The bridesmaid's dresses were purchased at Suzanne's as well; other than some shoddy alterations they have turned out OK. Thankfully Stephanie found a dress at David's Bridal in Sacramento (11 days until the wedding).

Catering - Spiteri's has largely been an exception to the bad service rule. The only problem here is that some details can only go through the owner Frank, and he can be really hard to get a hold of.

Party Rentals - Like catering this is something of a non example. A&J has mostly been really good. The only real problem was that the guy taking our order wandered off about five times in the middle of taking the order. We had to start from the beginning again each time he wandered off. What could have taken five minutes took an hour.

Guest Favors - I ordered the guest favors online. The original invoice they sent me didn't include shipping and tax so I assumed it was included. A day later they sent me another invoice for almost twice as much, this time including shipping and tax. Then they cut out the text from the tif image I sent them and retyped it with a typo...not expecting them to do something like that I missed the typo in the final proof.

OK, that's probably enough bitching for now...