A few days ago I read a newspaper article about a well-known long-established regional wedding photography business closing and informing its customers that it would be unable to return any deposits. Almost immediately, at least fifty individuals began filing complaints with the North Dakota Attorney General, stating that they had paid in the neighborhood of $5,000 for their wedding photography deposit. Fifty times $5,000, we are talking about more than $250,000 in unreturned deposits for services that were never received.

If/when you read some of the news articles about this situation, some of these articles state that the Attorney General’s Office has now received more than 170 complaints. Glasser Photography had applied for and received two loans totaling $500,000 as Covid paycheck assistance during the 2020/2021 pandemic. So for me, I am wondering where this $500,000 loan money and this likely more than $250,000 in unreturned deposits went.

But the reason why I chose to write a blog post article about this, is because I can’t believe that all of these women would pay more than $5,000 for wedding photography in the first place, let alone pay anyone $5,000 upfront for wedding photography that might not take place for more than a year, and maybe not at all if the wedding was cancelled.

If I loved some woman very much, a young beautiful woman with a great personality, who I thought that I could trust, if I ever found out that she had written a check for $5,000 to a wedding photographer as a deposit, the wedding would be off. Absolutely, positively the wedding would be off. What I would say, would be something like this:

“I can’t believe that you would give a wedding photographer $5,000.  I don’t make that much money, I have never made that much money where I could spend money like that.  I thought that I could trust you, and that we saw things eye-to-eye, that we were on the same page.  Now I realize that I was wrong, and that I can never trust you.  I can’t marry you.”

What I would be thinking was:  Man, I can’t believe that she did that.  I can’t believe that she would do something like that.  I thought that I could trust her.  I thought that she had better sense than that.  Now that she has done this, I now see that I can no longer trust her.  There is no telling what she might do, if she is going to spend money like that.

I would then easily be able to picture my fiance once we were married, wasting money constantly like it grows on trees, and then attempting to waste, destroy, and steal absolutely everything that I own during a divorce.

This is North Dakota, many of these women who were getting married are not that attractive, who wants to look at some plump girl’s wedding photos?  $5,000 wedding photos are just going to show more clearly how overweight and unattractive she, her bridesmaids, friends, and family members are.  Something like 50% of marriages fail, who’s going to want to look at wedding photos from a failed marriage?

Here is a Bismarck Tribune newspaper article:  https://bismarcktribune.com/news/local/bismarck/abrupt-closure-of-glasser-images-sends-couples-with-weddings-scrambling-ags-office-investigating/article_de932153-d0be-53b9-a3e4-b595dc612357.html

Here is a Grand Forks Herald newspaper article:  https://www.grandforksherald.com/business/7230139-Sudden-closure-of-Bismarck-photo-studio-prompts-flood-of-complaints-state-investigation