upscale plastic dinner wear vs real china

I could honestly care less about what kind if plate my food is served on.

When you really look at what 'nice' disposables cost versus rental china, it's not that different. I'd suggest pricing out each. You might be surprised.

I'm doing disposable but I thinks it's fine for a casual backyard wedding. I wouldn't do it at a fancy wedding though.

We used nicer disposable and it was very cost effective for us. It was a small, casual afternoon reception in the country. Nobody thought anything of it. I didn't want to have to deal with renting china. Our wedding was 3 hours from where we live... Pick-up/drop-off and washing everything was more than I wanted to deal with (and it was more $$&dollar.

What are you serving? I'm pretty sure plastic knives are the least useful product on the planet.

Sam's has decent disposable plates and utensils. I don't think your guests will care honestly. We're using disposable because our caterer requires that we pay for more servers if we use china.

We're having food stations and going with upscale plastic.

I agree that as a guest i could care less. I used the Chinet nicer paper plates.

Depends on your venue and what you're serving...

We decided to save money and rent the "upscale plastic" plates and flatware. We saw them sitting on the side table while we were doing our tasting and thought "that's real China, so they must have what we are using in the back". Sure enough, what we thought was "real" was the super nice plastic plates and flatware (which we used during our tasting to test out) that is much, much cheaper for us.

Point being, if you are trying to save money, you may be surprised at the high quality you can get and still be disposable.

Depends the kind of event you are having and what you are serving. I've been to some events that use 'silver plastic ware'. They look real, are heavier utensils and work well, however I assume they aren't all that cheap.

If you are having an outside/casual/picnic type event and I sat down to plastic ware I would say okay it at least goes with it. If I sat down to a more formal inside dinner and picked up my utensils and it looked real, but was plastic I would probably have some reserved thoughts that I would share with DH, but otherwise keep to myself.

We had a small (65 guests) backyard wedding and used the fancy disposables from Amazon. We priced out both and the disposables were slightly less. But for us, the disposables also took away the hassle of where would the dirty china go and who was going to clean it. We got married in our own backyard and our kitchen was fully in use by the caterers. So not having to worry about piles of dishes was a big deal for us!