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when the breadwinner of a union family died, the hard-fought-for death benefit, achieved often through bitter struggle and intended for the benefit of the surviving spouse and children, would end up in the pockets of an undertaker.
Bob’s idea of a solution was to organize a nonprofit group
I am sorry to say I rather mocked these good folks, calling them the Necrophilists and teasing them about their Layaway Plan.
As embalming is the ultimate fate of almost all Americans, the economic base of the funeral industry, and as practiced on a mass scale a uniquely American practice, to omit a description of it was unthinkable.
The Federal Trade Commission’s Consumer Protection Bureau had promulgated a “trade rule” which promised to go far to protect the unwary funeral buyer in his dealings with undertakers.
The Federal Trade Commission’s much heralded trade rule has huge loopholes. Most sinister of all is the emergence over the last fifteen years of monopoly ownership of hitherto independent mortuaries and cemeteries.
Reflecting on what I had gleaned from the Tiburon experience, I have concluded that not much has changed over the years in the way undertakers see their world. They would still “vastly prefer” to be looked on as “trained professional men with high standards of ethical conduct,” but the exigencies of their trade still force them into the role of “merchants of a rather grubby order.”
Many a badly stung survivor, faced with the aftermath of some relative’s funeral, has ruefully concluded that the victory has been won hands down by a funeral establishment—in a disastrously unequal battle.
Gradually, almost imperceptibly, over the years the funeral men have constructed their own grotesque cloud-cuckoo-land where the trappings of Gracious Living are transformed, as in a nightmare, into the trappings of Gracious Dying.
A new mythology, essential to the twentieth-century American funeral rite, has grown up—or rather has been built up step-by-step—to justify the peculiar customs surrounding the disposal of our dead.
The first of these is the tenet that today’s funeral procedures are founded in “American tradition.”
Simplicity to the point of starkness, the plain pine box, the laying out of the dead by friends and family who also bore the coffin to the grave—these were the hallmarks of the traditional American funeral until the end of the nineteenth century.
Secondly, there is the myth that the American public is only being given what it wants—an opportunity to keep up with the Joneses to the end.
Thirdly, there is an assortment of myths based on half-digested psychiatric theories. The importance of the “memory picture” is stressed—meaning the last glimpse of the deceased in an open casket, done up with the latest in embalming techniques and finished off with a dusting of makeup.
Lastly, a whole new terminology, as ornately shoddy as the rayon satin casket liner, has been invented by the funeral industry to replace the direct and serviceable vocabulary of former times.
When these costs are added to the undertaker’s bill, the total average cost for an adult’s funeral today is $7,800.
is this what most people want for themselves and their families?
Some indication of the pent-up resentment felt by vast numbers of people against the funeral interests was furnished by the astonishing response to Roul Tunley’s 1961 Saturday Evening Post article.
Three months after the article appeared, an estimated six thousand had taken pen in hand to comment on some phase of the high cost of dying.
In 1994 Russ Harman launched Affordable Funeral Service
Taking the low-cost approach to the extreme,
Back in the sixties, the American public suddenly rebelled against the trend in the auto industry towards ever more showy cars, with their ostentatious and nonfunctional fins, and a demand was created for compact cars patterned after European models.
Could it be that the same cycle is working itself out in the attitude towards the final return of dust to dust, that the American public is becoming sickened by ever more ornate and costly funerals, and that a status symbol of the future may indeed be the simplest kind of “funeral without fins”?
A funeral is not an occasion for a display of cheapness. It is, in fact, an opportunity for the display of a status symbol which, by bolstering family pride, does much to assuage grief.
The sellers of funeral service have, one gathers, a preconceived, stereotyped view of their customers. To them, the bereaved person who enters the funeral establishment is a bundle of guilt feelings, a snob, and a status seeker.
Whether or not one agrees with this rather unflattering appraisal of the average person who has suffered a death in the family, it is nevertheless true that the funeral transaction is generally influenced by a combination of circumstances which bear upon the buyer as in no other type of business dealing: the disorientation caused by bereavement, the lack of standards by which to judge the value of the commodity offered by the seller, the need to make an on-the-spot decision, general ignorance of the law as it affects disposal of the dead, the ready availability of insurance money to finance
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The funeral seller, like any other merchant, is preoccupied with price, profit, selling techniques.
The trade considers that the most important element of funeral salesmanship is the proper arrangement of caskets in the selection room (where the customer is taken to make his purchase).
endless thought and care are lavished on the development of new and better selection-room arrangements,
The relationship between casket arrangement and sales psychology is discussed quite fully by Mr. W. M. Krieger, former managing director of the influential National Selected Morticians association, in his book Successful Funeral Management.
In developing his method of display, Mr. Krieger divides the stock of caskets for convenience into four “quartiles,” two above and two below the median price,
Everything is, however, most carefully spelled out, beginning with the injunction to greet the clients with a warm and friendly handshake and a suggested opening statement, which should be “spoken slowly and with real sincerity: ‘I want to assure you that I’m going to do everything I can to be helpful to you!’ ”
“weave in the service story”—in other words, impress upon the family that they will be entitled to all sorts of extras,
He is now led to position B on the diagram—a better casket priced at $647. However, this price is not to be mentioned. Rather, the words “sixty dollars additional” are to be used.
The great majority of funeral buyers, as they are led through their paces at the mortuary—whether shaken and grief-stricken or merely looking forward with pleasurable anticipation to the reading of the will—are assailed by many a nagging question: What’s the right thing to do?
Which leads us to the second special aspect of the funeral transaction: the buyer’s almost total ignorance of what to expect when he enters the undertaker’s parlor.
The cost of the funeral is the third-largest expenditure, after a house and a car, in the life of an ordinary American family.
I would think college should be on this list
Because of the nature of funerals, the buyer is in a quite different position from the one who is, for example, in the market for a car.
The funeral buyer is generally not in the mood to compare prices here, examine and appraise quality there. He is anxious to get the whole thing over with—
The third unusual factor which confronts the buyer is the need to make an on-the-spot decision.
In 1994 the FTC amended the Funeral Rule to prohibit undertakers from charging a special “casket-handling fee” to customers who purchased caskets from the storefront discount outlets that were beginning to make their appearance.
Popular ignorance about the law as it relates to the disposal of the dead is a factor that sometimes affects the funeral transaction. People are often astonished to learn that in no state is embalming required by law except in certain special circumstances, such as when the body is to be shipped by common carrier.
It was just this sort of tactic described above that moved the FTC to rule in 1984 that morticians may no longer lie to the public.
The fifth unusual factor present in the funeral transaction is the availability to the buyer of relatively large sums of cash.
“One of the practical difficulties in such proceedings is that contracts for funerals are ordinarily made by persons differently situated. On the one side is generally a person greatly agitated or overwhelmed by vain regrets or deep sorrow, and on the other side persons whose business it is to minister to the dead for profit. One side is, therefore, often unbusiness-like, vague and forgetful, while the other is ordinarily alert, knowing and careful.”
The funeral industry faces a unique economic situation in that its market is fixed, or inelastic,
Practical Burial Footware of Columbus, Ohio,
The women’s lingerie department of Practical Burial Footwear
Also for the ladies are custom burial gowns, bootees, stole, and bra “for post mortem form restoration,” offered by Lipari Gowns of Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
Florence Gowns of Cleveland, Ohio, exhibited their line of “streetwear type garments and negligees,”
