Parent Category: Upper-Intermediate News Lessons

Category: Relationships Lessons

Written by Chris Cotter

In a sharing economy, people rent out goods, services, and expertise, and the trend has grown in recent years. Many of the successful companies begin in the US, but soon expand around the world. After all, there are resources everywhere, and everyone wants to earn more cash if they can fulfill a need.

Airbnb is one recognizable example. People rent out their homes or spare rooms to vacationers on a nightly, weekly, or even monthly basis. Uber, which is an Internet taxi service, is also very popular, and anyone with a car, accident insurance, and a driver's license can become a taxi driver or chauffeur. There's Elance too, where professionals can freelance their skills as a writer, web designer, translator, accountant, and so on. However, perhaps one of the more unique examples of the sharing economy comes from South Korea, where weddings hire fake friends to attend the ceremony.

It might seem that hiring fake friends on such an important occasion is inconceivable. Weddings are a big deal in South Korea, though. There is a lot of pomp in the ceremony, such as musical numbers, skits, and several hundred guests in attendance. According to Korean tradition, the immediate family, extended family, and family friends must all be invited. As such, it can be a problem if, for example, the groom has two hundred guests and the bride has only fifty guests. In order to save face, the solution is to hire actors.

Fake guests get reimbursed roughly $20 per ceremony, and the actors might attend several weddings in one day during the busy season. The service that offers wedding guests contains a database of 20,000 actors, and these people can also be hired as fake bosses, office employees, family members, spouses, and even mistresses.