Here comes the bridal panhandler

"The audacity that some of these bachelorette parties have when asking for free stuff from businesses is crazy," Weber marveled in a post on TikTok. "Ma'am, if you can afford an Aspen bachelorette trip, you can afford a ski sweater from my shop."

The bride's outrageous request wasn't as unusual as you might imagine. According to a recent story in The Wall Street Journal, brides-to-be across the country are flooding companies with so-called "PR" requests for free merchandise to distribute as swag at their bachelorette parties.

"The future brides are sharing lists of contacts at companies and scripts to follow when emailing them," the Journal's Megan Graham reported. "They post 'haul' videos if they succeed, sometimes accompanied by the precise phrasing that worked." When they fail, they gripe about the lack of response — sometimes in moody clips set to Taylor Swift songs.

Welcome to the latest form of wedding greed: social media panhandling.

As longtime readers may know, I am a confirmed foe of wedding gift registries, on the grounds, as I once put it in a column, that they amount to institutionalized avarice. They are merely glorified shopping lists, with other people paying the tab. To compile a list of desired presents is impersonal and mercenary; the message it enshrines is that the gifts matter more than the giver.

But at least bridal registries are intended to be consulted by friends and family who are already planning to give the newlyweds a gift. This new racket is worse. It tries to conscript total outsiders — small-business owners and vendors who have no connection to the bride — and importunes them to foot the bill for her party favors.

The Journal relates cringe-inducing examples of how tawdry the cupidity has become. Some bachelorettes blast out hundreds of emails to companies at a time, copying wording they find online. Many don't even try to get the details right. Bulk Butter CEO Emily Koltermann, who sells nut butters in a variety of flavors, has received fawning notes from women insisting they love using her product "on their skin" — a bizarre claim, since Bulk Butter sells only spreads for eating. Another brand owner said she received so many generic pitches still addressed to "[insert business here]" that she set up an inbox filter to block them.

The appetite for handouts doesn't stop with hitting up vendors. On Reddit's r/weddingshaming forum, users post photos of bachelorette caravans covered with slogans like "Buy the Bride a Drink" and displaying a Venmo ID on the rear windshield. Bachelorette parties have become rolling GoFundMe campaigns, soliciting cash from passersby.

Judith Martin, the esteemed newspaper columnist known by the pen name Miss Manners, told Smithsonian magazine in 2011 that "the major etiquette problem in America nowadays is blatant greed" — specifically, "people who are scheming to get money and possessions from other people, and who believe they are entitled to do so." Nearly 15 years later, even Miss Manners might be dumbfounded by the extent to which casual greed has become prevalent among those planning to get married.

The Knot, a major wedding-planning website, devotes an online page to teaching brides-to-be "How to Get the Best Free Bachelorette Items" and encouraging them to "score freebies to add to your crew's swag bags or use at your beach bash."

The whole thing is shabby. A party is supposed to be an expression of joy and thankfulness. A wedding, above all, ought to highlight generosity — of spirit, of friendship, of love. Yet in case after case, what takes center stage is acquisitiveness dressed up as celebration, as if the point were not so much to envelop loved ones in happiness as to extract from third parties as much as possible.

Business Insider labels this brazenness "Bride or Die" — part of the "bachelorette industrial complex." Ordinary brides, even those with no more than a modest personal online following, put on a show of mimicking influencers, turning themselves into marketers and their friends into props. But these requests for free swag aren't the work of professional content generators angling for a brand partnership. The payoff these brides are chasing isn't a marketing contract or a polished Instagram grid. It's the ability to boast that they got strangers to send them merchandise for free. At bottom, it's just the oldest of motives: the thrill of "gimme."

Not every company resists these requests. The Wall Street Journal noted that at least some brands have formalized the process, setting aside merchandise to ship out in response to bridal pitches. But the fact that there are companies that indulge the practice doesn't make it any less objectionable. It just normalizes the unseemly practice of turning celebrations of love into exercises in acquisition.

There will always be rationalizations: "It's just marketing." "It doesn't hurt to ask." "Everybody's doing it." But it does hurt. It cheapens the celebration, it is unfair to the small enterprises that get targeted, and it replaces gratitude with grasping.

Weddings are already exorbitant affairs and expectations often run high. But the answer isn't to transfer the bill to strangers or to rebrand mooching as savvy marketing. It is to scale back, to remember that what matters in these milestones isn't the volume of swag but the intensity of human connection. A party intended to celebrate friendship, love, and commitment shouldn't need free body-care products — or $95 ski sweaters — to be memorable.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission.

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