Ring! Ring! Good News!

With frugality being the latest fashion, pundits predict the $161 billion wedding industry is poised to take a pretty big hit. But before you hit the panic button, this could be good news for jewelers.

Back in June, Newsweek magazine featured an article titled “Brides Go on a Budget in This Lousy Economy,” highlighting some budget-friendly alternatives to an over-the-top wedding. With a $28,000 bill for the average wedding, says the article, more and more couples are opting to scale back the excess and put the money aside for the important things in a marriage that come after the wedding day—like a house and children.

Among the ways couples are economizing: skipping the fancy engraved invitations in lieu of handwritten notes, or even going green with e-vites; foregoing lavish floral arrangements in lieu of seasonal local flowers in vases of water; faking the fancy tiered cake with a Styrofoam model (only the top layer is real, for the cut-the-cake photo) and actually serving slices of inexpensive sheet cake for dessert, buying secondhand or discounted gowns, and skipping the band in favor of a DJ, or, even more frugally, foregoing the DJ in favor of an iPod and a good set of speakers.

So, what could possibly be good news for jewelers? The one thing the article did not cite as expendable was the rings! My guess is that it’s because everything else, while elegant, is disposable. Invitations are thrown away. Cake is eaten. Flowers die. The gown is worn once and packed in a box, never to be worn again unless the couple has a daughter who feels sentimental enough to wear it for her own wedding.

But the rings are the only part of a wedding that really have lasting value. If the average wedding costs $28,000, and lasts about 8 hours, that’s $3,500 an hour for all the fripperies. $3,500 to $4,000, incidentally, is the average cost of an engagement ring today. So here’s some convincing math you can use at the counter when a couple starts to question the cost of a ring:

Wedding-day memories last forever, of course, but most of the retelling and revisiting of photos and such will be done in the first year of marriage. So, using the same math, the ring costs about 45 cents an hour vs. $3,500 an hour. (A $4000 ring divided by 365 days/year = $10.95 per day for a year of wear. $10.95 divided by 24 hours/day = 45.6 cents an hour for a year of wear.) And the ring is likely to be worn for the next 50 years or so, further reducing its cost-per-wearing. Add in two wedding rings, estimate roughly $1000 for each, divided by 365 days a year is $5.47 per day, or about 23 cents an hour. So, in total, three rings cost 68 cents an hour–still $3,432 less per hour than the rest of the wedding!

Now if that isn’t a compelling reason for a couple to make the rings the one area where they still want to splurge a little—after all, it is their wedding—I don’t know what is!