I imagine this has been asked but I couldn’t seem to find it… any ideas why so few people seem to RSVP to invitations, especially ones that specifically request a reply?
I remember when I got married a few years ago, we got about half of our replies in by the date requested, then were able to hunt down replies to most of the remaining ones, but for whatever reason couldn’t nail down about 6 people, half of whom showed up and half of whom did not.
I’m right now planning a birthday party for my kindergarten-age daughter, and her whole class is invited, plus a couple other friends. Again, I’ve had to hunt down responses from about half, and I have a handful left that I have no way of contacting (kids who are dropped off for inschool daycare before I get there so I don’t have any idea who their parents are). Obviously not a big deal for a birthday party - ordering extra pizza to feed a few kids who may or may not show up is less frustrating than paying $100+ per head for wedding guests who may or may not show up - but I still just don’t get it. I provided email and phone info, and it seems to me it takes all of one minute to respond, so why do so many people just not bother?
I just had a conversation like this with a friend. He was annoyed because someone from his work was retiring, and they kept sending emails about RSVPing. My friend Z stated that in Texas, RSVP means to respond if you are coming. If you don’t respond, it means you aren’t coming. I explained that RSVP actually is the French abbreviation for “respond if you please” which means you should respond either way. His reply was “not in Texas it doesn’t.”
Course, he’s not in Texas now. I finally convinced him just to tell them he wasn’t going. I’m sure in his head he’s still convinced that it was an unnecessary effort on his part.
Gotta agree with this one. Mr. Ipsum and I host a movie night for a club we belong to. Once a month we show a recent DVD, and we just asked that people call us by the day before, so we’d know how many to expect.
This one guy would come occasionally, and he’d always call the night before (which was a weeknight) sometimes after 10:30, when we were often going to bed. (Yes, we are boring homebodies.) So we started setting a time, asking people to call by 9pm on the night before, so then the guy would always call around 8:30. I assumed that he was always waiting for a better offer, and if nothing came up right before our deadline, then he’d decide to do our movie night.
Because people are either ignorant of what RSVP means, they completely forgot (this has unfortunately happened to me a couple of times when the invitation got buried under a mountain of mail) or they’re too lazy to bother or some combination thereof.
People who fail to RSVP make me nuts, too, especially when they assume that an invitation means they’ll just show up, RSVP or not.
I think part of it is that, nowadays, with all the instant graitifcation and convenience available, people are much less in the habit about planning ahead for things. For example, in the pre-cellphone era, if you wanted to get together with someone, you had to agree well ahead of time on a time and place to meet up. So people balk at making firm commitments now for what they’ll do a couple of weeks from now.
I’ll expand that to, because they don’t think about the repercussions of their actions (or non-actions), and how difficult it is to plan anything without knowing how many people are coming, and then scrambling at the last minute to accommodate people who show up unexpectedly.
ETA: Maybe in Texas you can count on the people who didn’t RSVP to not show up, but not anywhere else (and I doubt that’s true in Texas, either).
You are having a birthday party for kindergarteners and you’ve sent out invitations to the whole class? Or did you hand out flyers at the school? We got these things (the flyers) a few times and no, we did not RSVP. Flyers, global invitations, or word of mouth invitations from people we don’t know well don’t get RSVPs. That is asking everyone else to plan out your party via hivemind.
I don’t know about the OP, but at our school, if you want to give out the invitations at school, you have to invite the whole class (or all the boys for a boy’s party, all the girls for a girl’s party) so we asked for a class list and wrote invitations to individuals with an RSVP email and phone number.
We actually did pretty well for each of our kids’ parties. We got an 80% and 90% response rate.
The worst part is that we were paying a venue per child and had to know a week in advance so I did some guessing and ended up paying more for kids who ‘might’ show up (there is no way I am turning away a child who did not RSVP at the door).
Oddly, for our wedding the people who did not RSVP thought we ‘knew’ that they were or weren’t coming (or if they were bringing a guest). Since it was all family, I just sent my mother and future mother in law after them.
(Aside: Actually when I put together my wedding guest list, I included phone numbers. My mom asked why and I said it was for when they didn’t RSVP, she gave me a head pat and said that everyone RSVPs, it was mostly her side of the family that did not)
“I’m going to tell you a secret that no one else will tell you. No one wants to come to your wedding.”
Jerry Seinfield
I kid…I kid…
I think we’ve moved from a time when all social occasions required RSVPs, e.g. pot luck dinners in the 70s and people were used to RSVPing, even if it was just a confirmation over the phone, to a much more casual approach to socialising, e.g. such-and-such is having a party on Friday night and you might turn up sometime during the evening. So I think people are out of the habit of actually committing to being someone on a certain date at a certain time.
While I can’t disagree with any of the above reasons, I do think some of it may be, people don’t really understand. I’ve run across people who really think RSVP means to reply IF you’re coming, otherwise you don’t have to bother.
In other words they don’t know they’re supposed to say, “No, I’m not coming.”
I am usually very good about RSVPing when I know one way or the other if I’m coming. That said, often I don’t, which has on occasion resulted in said RSVP being left on a kitchen counter to be addressed when my wife gets home and has a look at the calendar. Except then she places a magazine, or mail, or bills on top of it and it gets forgotten. That recently happened with an ex co-workers wedding invitation. That’s actually a rarity, though because if I know someone needs a real headcount because of the cost per guest, I’m usually very responsive. That said, if I say I’m coming, I will definitely be there, and if I say I won’t then I won’t show up come even if the conflicting event changes.
But then you have the more generic Evite for a party at someone’s house where dozens of people are invited. That can create a problem if the person inviting you is someone you just sort of know and if there aren’t going to be a lot of other people there who you’ll know other than the host. For most parties, a ‘maybe’ will do it, and I’ll usually go anyway, but sometimes the host wants a yes or no. It only gets worse if the person makes you commit well in advance for a “meh” event, particularly when you are on the hook for a food item at a potluck, or a gift because it is a birthday/baby shower/housewarming. That may cause me to really consider whether I want to go, and if you ask me too far in advance because you are anal and want to know three months ahead of time, I might sit on the invitation until it gets closer. And once again, the Evite might accidentally get deleted with other e-mails or simply get forgotten in an overcrowded inbox.
Obviously close friends get an immediate answer no matter what, and the answer is always yes, but its the ‘friends of friends’ and the sort of co-workers ones that are the harder ones here. I can understand people not RSVPing in those cases. The thing I don’t get is the person who says they AREN’T coming or doesn’t respond and shows up. That’s just weird. For our wedding, we had about a 90% response rate, and just called the rest and got an answer over the phone. I didn’t think it was rude. I simply figured my wedding wasn’t as big an event in their life as it was in mine. In almost every case, the people who didn’t respond were people I didn’t know very well, so I could understand their reluctance to show up.
When planning for our daughter’s wedding, I couldn’t get one of my good friends to commit. We had passed the caterer’s deadline for final count; three days before the wedding, I asked said friend if she was coming and she said, “Don’t worry, if I come I won’t eat so you won’t have to pay for me.” I told her, “I already HAVE paid for you to eat! Just in case!”
Gah, I’m still pissed about that 3 years later!
No, she did not attend and our friendship suffered, not because I was dying to have her there and not because she chose not to come, but because she couldn’t summon the balls to say “No, I think I’ll pass.” Attend or not–I don’t care, but TELL ME!
RSVPs are not merely quaint social niceties. The host’s time, effort and money are involved in planning whether it’s a backyard barbecue, a movie night or a fancy sit-down dinner at a fine restaurant. Ignoring an RSVP sends a message about how much you value your host. Nobody cares if you decline–just fucking decide!
Sorry if I’m a little too passionate on this topic.
While I RSVP, I don’t get all the hate over people who don’t. I always thought when you’re planning an event you order more food than people invited anyway. People have lives. So, maybe they’re really stressed or forgot. Not RSVPing doesn’t make you a bad person. While it’s semi rude, it’s not the rudest thing one can do. If half your people aren’t RSVPing and you couldn’t track down six of them, maybe you sent the RSVP to the wrong address.