Bride Sends Bill: Wedding Guests Billed For No-Show

A bride sent a bill to a friend who did not show up to her wedding. The disgruntled Minnesota newlywed caused her friend, Jessica Baker, to become so incensed she went to the local media to share the story.

The 33-year-old Golden Valley woman told KARE11 that she initially send an RSVP stating she would attend the wedding with her husband. But, on the morning the nuptials were scheduled to take place, her mother was unable to babysit. The bride and groom did not permit children to attend either the wedding ceremony or the reception which followed.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jessica Baker told KARE 11 when discussing the bride sending a bill for missing the wedding.

Baker, from Andover, said she and her husband were excited to have a night out and attend the wedding. The couple has a 2-year-old daughter and a 5-year-old son. Grandma backed out of babysitting at the last minute because another grandchild she had just spent time with came down sick with hand-foot-and-mouth disease. The grandmother did not want to expose her other grandchildren to the illness and was helping to care for the sick child.

Several weeks after the Minnesota wedding, Baker said the bride sent a bill for $75 to cover the cost of the meals intended for the friend and her spouse. The bill also reportedly stated that the couple would have been dining on two herb-crusted walleye. A service charge and tax were also noted on the wedding bill. The couple is considering donating the $75 to charity and sending the bride and groom a receipt for the act of charity, ABC News reports.

An excerpt from the note from the bride reads as follows.

“This cost reflects the amount paid by the bride and groom for meals that were RSVP’d for, reimbursement and explanation for no show, card, call or text would be appreciated.”

Jessica Baker said she has not yet responded to the bride and added that she will not be paying the $75 bill.

Wedding guest receives bill from bride! http://t.co/MaXAFYiv3u pic.twitter.com/0N0vBriLXT

— Inside Country (@Inside_Country_) September 30, 2015

“I guess I don’t know what the right answer would have been. What the right thing to do would have been,” Baker added.

Baker posted the wedding no-show bill to her Facebook page and received an outpouring of comments about the actions of the bride. After sharing the bride’s note on the Facebook page of her local news station, the letter went viral.

The wedding invitation was for a distant relative of Jessica’s husband, who the woman said they barely knew.

“We had discussed if we should contact anyone and decided against it because, coincidentally enough, we’d had people RSVP and no-show to our wedding and I knew when I got married I didn’t want to be bothered with phone calls on the day of my wedding. I just assumed, I guess, that we’d let them know the situation later on.”

Sarah Baumann Rogers, the editor of magazine Minnesota Bride, said that when couples are planning a wedding, they should plan for no-shows to occur. Rogers also noted that the general rule is to figure that 10 percent more or less guests will actually show up for the big day and plan accordingly. According to the wedding expert, catering companies are also aware of the 10 percent overage and underage guest estimations when preparing for big events.

“Under no circumstances should you choose to follow up after the fact, kind of questioning why they couldn’t attend or much less sending a bill,” the bride magazine editor stated.

What do you think about the bride sending a bill to the Minnesota couple who were a no-show at the wedding?

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