What’s your opinion? Good or bad? Necessary evil? Let us know in the comments below.
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While it may be horribly impolite, it will make my life a lot happier (and easier)!
I’m not a fan of them, but when my parents (who are paying for 90% of the wedding) keep adding guests I have told them that we can only add to a “b” list. It’s horribly impolite but keeps the arguments to a minimum.
Necessary evil. I think it can be done tactfully. No reason for people to know they were on the B list. But try to keep those of the same social circle on the same list.
How close to the RSVP date can “B list” invites be sent out?
It’s a huge help if you’re limited on space. If we didn’t have the limitation we would have invited anyone we wanted, regardless of cost — I think it’s fairly tacky to not be able to “afford” someone irregardless of the numbers invited. But for us, our ceremony location is 175 MAXIMUM, and when we made our list of people we want to invite, it was roughly 200. Hence, the B-list was born — if we could have just paid to add them in, I think my parents would have done that route, but we didn’t want to have to find a new ceremony location.
I don’t think it’s a problem as long as you ensure that the same people in a social circle all receive invitations at the same time. Since my parents are paying for most of the invitation, it was our friends and my labmates who were on the B list. As we got back no responses, we waited until we had enough to invite a group of friends, or all my coworkers at once, so there would be no issue of “hmm, how come so-and-so received an invitation 3 weeks before me?”.
It helps that we printed our own RSVPs so it was easy to push back the RSVP by date on the B list invitations, so they’re not receiving them in the mail with directions to RSVP by the end of the week.
kat – i think you’ve gotta give them about two weeks, but if you can do julie’s idea of changing the date, do it!
sigh… a necessary evil. with our huge families and parents reluctant to make any cuts, the A and B lists were necessary. a lot of people are out of towners, so if they can’t come we’ll bump up some B listers. it feels terrible, but it’s the only solution for us.
We did an A list / B list thing – but instead A stood for those who we thought would actually attend the wedding and B stood for those who we thought would not attend the wedding, but we should invite anyway.
Fortunately for us, this made it really easy to say OKAY to a list of 201 people when we planned to accommodate 150. After all, even those we think will attend may not, and some who we didn’t think would attend might still!
Bad. Just cut the list at the beginning and if people you expected to come, can’t, don’t try to fill in their spot. Way too many drama issues arise with B lists and people always know they weren’t your first pick.
I agree with Liene. I think classifying your loved ones in such a way is tacky and rude. If I knew I was on someone’s B list, I wouldn’t go. I would feel like I was crowd filler.
Then again, I also don’t believe in over the top weddings where the couple doesn’t know half the people there.
My problem is that my fiance and my families are huge, but that leaves little room for friends that aren’t “close” friends. There are friends of mine that I see every day and would love to have there but there just isn’t a ton of extra wiggle room in the budget at $150/head. If my fiance wasn’t in the military and didn’t have friends scattered around the world we’d be in real trouble haha.
I think we’re gonna do a small B list, I only ordered 25 extra invites so we’ll see.
necessary evil. family was automatically on our “A” list, but distant friends of our parents and former high school friends that we never talk to anymore were put on the “B” list. We also planned our guest list out, like Kate did, and listed out those on the A list we knew/thought would come and who wouldn’t come, but should still get an invite. Then we moved down to the “B” list and were actually able to invite everyone on the “B” list and keep our expected guests at around 150. It worked out for us. However, I WOULDN’t advise attempting to send out invitations and then at the last minute send out some to the B listers when A listers don’t respond. Chances are, with the RSVP deadline quite close (or already passed by the time they get it) they will know they are on the “B” list.
We had people who “had” to have an invite. They knew they weren’t coming, they just wanted the invite. To me, that’s tacky and rude. We also had people RSVP and then do a no show. Which I think is even ruder. I really wish I had put those people on the B list.