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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2814 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 1, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Congratulations. With a predatory wedding industry and keeping-up-with-ashley mindset on social media, a courthouse elopement is the most cost-effective and sane way of getting married.

If you’re religious, the old Sunday morning ceremony followed by potluck in the parish hall is pretty cheap too.

Seriously. We saw photos of a wedding our friend went to that no joke cost $160k (flowers alone were $15k) bankrolled by the bride's rich family. Within the opulent displays of wealth genre, it seems weddings remain the least socially offensive.

Could weddings be a new avenue for laundering money?

How would that even work? The point of laundering money is to fabricate a plausible legal source for illegally-obtained cash, and I don't see how an extravagant wedding accomplishes that.

You can't? Seems obvious to me. Astronomical prices for goods or services that have little to no fixed value. Many wedding businesses are already random fly by night operations. You could set up front companies for catering, flowers, photos, pay with illicit cash, then take 90% on the back end as legitimate business income.

Whose money is being laundered and who is doing the laundering?

Same person for both. Imagine they bill you 15k for flowers, write it up as 30k on their books, you pay 15k however you pay, they pay another 15k in illegal cash. It all gets written up as coming from you, even though half of it is their own money illegally gained but now with a "legitimate" income source. So long as nobody compares notes.

Then again, everything I know about money laundering I learned from Breaking Bad and Ozark, so you know. Grain of salt and all that.

The "split-invoicing" you're describing would indeed be money laundering, but I don't see how wedding suppliers are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this tactic. It would immediately raise red flags if a florist is depositing tens of thousands of dollars in cash since weddings are not known to be a cash-intensive industry. Generally you'd want a service business which has little to no variable costs (like flower inventory) to keep track of. That's why Breaking Bad used a car wash, and Ozark used a strip club. Both are perfect money-laundering operations.

Just a nitpick - while the store front of most florists isn't cash intensive, the back end can be, especially if you go heavily on the 'locally sourced, independent farmer' angle. A lot of my family is in the flower industry, and "is it because they're money laundering?" is a common response when people learn how outrageous florist mark ups can be, like charging $20 a stem for roses you paid $10 a bunch for outrageous. But really it's a combination of luxury, perishability, ip, antitrust prospiracy and the fact that the majority of people who go into flowers just want to play with flowers, not run a business.

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