Wedding Buffet Turns Into The Hunger Games As Guests Are Forced To Fight Over Scraps

There is no denying that putting together a wedding is quite the logistical ordeal. The guestlist, decorations, seating, venue and, of course, the food. Feeding a large group is always going to be expensive, but generally the cost is worth it. After all, you don’t want to be the person who left a group of, ostensibly, your friends and family, hungry because you wanted to penny-pinch.

A woman shared her frustration with a wedding caterer after her table of eight all ran out of food because of greedy guests. We reached out to the woman in the story via private message and will update the article when she gets back to us.

Catering a wedding isn’t exactly easy. In the US, providing your guests with food costs, on average, around $4000, while in some states it's as high as $7000. Of course, these numbers don’t say a lot, so it can be helpful to break them down a bit. The Knot surveyed its readers and found that, on average, the happy couple spent roughly $85 per person.

So imagine heading to your favorite restaurant with $85 and think about the sort of meal you can get. Of course, catering often means paying other costs that aren’t directly related to the food, for example, the people who bring the food, set it up and perhaps serve it. The tables, cutlery and dishes all factor in as well. In a restaurant, these items will be used repeatedly, but for a wedding, you are basically paying to rent them, which is not going to be cheap.

That being said, food is just such a normal and important part of human life that the majority of couples did indicate that they see the dishes and drinks as something to pay a premium for. Wined and dined guests are going to be significantly more happy than hungry guests. Similarly, one doesn’t want to be the person who is forever remembered as having cheaped out on food for the guests.

That being said, accidents do happen. As some readers suggested, there is a reasonable chance that the vendors simply ate the food that was intended for these guests. Now, this is not to say that the vendors don’t deserve to eat, they’ve no doubt been working all day and need food as well.

But either the couple simply didn’t plan for this or the vendors realized they could get away with it. There is the chance that the couple just wanted to save money and this is why they decided to “stagger” which tables take what food. Inevitably, the “important” people eat first, as is so often the case in human history. Guest lists often end up getting pretty big anyway, so any couple would be wise to be flexible when it comes to getting food.

There is also the possibility that greedy guests did simply take too much, leaving the last folks with nothing. Again, this should have been planned for. It’s nice to imagine that your friends and family will show a community spirit when getting their food, but people can make mistakes or just decide that they are entitled to more.

Ultimately, this story can be a sort of cautionary tale to any couples planning their weddings right now. People love to eat. People are also scared of scarcity. If folks see a buffet and think there “might not be enough for me,” they will take too much. You have to plan around this or make sure the vendors know exactly how to divvy out the portions.

This is going to cost more money at the end of the day, but consider it from an alternative perspective. If you are already spending a lot of money for your wedding, you want it to be memorable. Expensive flowers are lovely, but, as this wedding shows, all that goodwill will fall out of the window if people go hungry. This is enough to get your wedding shamed, after all.

After all, humans love a “free” meal. At a wedding, they downright expect it. Since dinner tends to be towards the end of the proceedings, leaving folks hungry is going to be the last thing they remember from the occasion. All the decor, planning choices, music and so on will drop away compared to an empty stomach.