“how much money is spent in other clearly less important areas of wedding expenses.”
In truth, here is where AZ is right. The role of the shadchan has evolved from one of facilitating a meeting between a boy and a girl to one of pinkerton detective, babysitter, mother, shrink, ego booster, ego massager, whipping boy and this is all before the boy even says yes to agree to see a girl. Once that happens, the process repeats itself to some degree depending on how desperate the girls side is. Then, the shadchan must play telephone tag to arrange a meeting between the two and again after the meeting to see how each side wants to proceed, and then the game starts again. Of course, by then, a different Pinkerton detective has uncovered some whiff of an allegation that the girl may have been a bed wetter until she was 4 years old and she may have sucked her thumb well into her 1st grade year resulting in further investigations, research and analysis, further delaying a possible second meeting. By the time it is agreed to, both sides dont even remember the 1st meeting. This process intensifies if this progresses to a third, fourth or a fifth meeting. By this time, half the Pinkerton agency has done some work on this shidduch, the shadchan has a dossier 75 pages thick on each person, another 45 pages on the family and even a 125 page magnum opus on the elte bubbes from Vilna and Riga down the peddler they both purchased their tichels from.
Now, a crack team of investigators is surely entitled to the going rate that any licensed PI firm makes in a particular region. I’m sure a quick search on monster.com will yield the going rate for this industry. Either we pay the Pinkertons, er shadchanim, their proper due, or we go back to the way shidduchim used to be done. A shadchan propsed female a, for male b. If their Rav, Rebbe, Rosh Yeshiva, neighbor or other trustworthy yid said they were fine upstanding yidden, the shidduch was considered. shadchan would give the male the phone number for female, tell him to call tuesday between 9 and 11 and that was it. Until we go back to the sensible way of doing things, $1500 to a shadchan for a shidduch is a bargain.