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To be “ethical” merely means to adhere to a prevailing code of morality, in this case one devised over the years by the undertakers themselves for their own purposes.
“These people seem to know exactly how much a warehouse worker gets, and how much an office secretary,” he would complain, “and they set the price of the funeral accordingly.”
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.
In point of fact, the cost of a funeral almost always varies, not “according to individual taste” but according to what the traffic will bear.
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. Another, impressively authentic-sounding, is the need for “grief therapy,” which is big now in mortuary circles.
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:
While the difference in quality is demonstrable, the price is not so low as to make the buyer feel belittled. At the same time, if the buyer turns his nose up and indicates that he didn’t want to go that low, now is the time to show him the “rebound unit”—one priced from $25 to $50 above the median, in the $425 to $450 bracket.
He is started off at position A, a casket costing $587, which he is told is “in the $500 range”—although, as the manual points out, it is actually $13 short of $600. He is informed that the average family buys in the $500 range—a statement designed to reassure him, explain the authors, because “most of the people believe themselves to be above average.”
It will be noted that the prices all end in the number seven, “purposely styled to allow you to quote as ‘sixty dollars additional’ or ‘save a hundred dollars.’ ”
The funeral industry estimates that the average individual has to arrange for a funeral only once in fifteen years. The cost of the funeral is the third-largest expenditure, after a house and a car, in the life of an ordinary American family.
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 wrong type of director will refuse to give an itemized list of costs, but will, instead, do his best to hypnotize the family into believing that the more expensive the casket, the more elaborate the preparations, the greater the love and honor shown the deceased.
“So then you’ve got a slumber room tied up for three days or more,” he said. “Right there’s a consideration: How much would it cost you to stay in a good motel for three days?”
In all likelihood, the idle time of employees is figured in and prorated as part of the “man-hours.” The up-to-date funeral home operates on a twenty-four-hour basis,
Yet no law requires embalming, no religious doctrine commends it, nor is it dictated by considerations of health, sanitation, or even of personal daintiness. In no part of the world but in North America is it widely used. The purpose of embalming is to make the corpse presentable for viewing in a suitably costly container; and here too the funeral director routinely, without first consulting the family, prepares the body for public display.
In the case of embalming, permission is required (under Federal Trade Commission rules) only if a charge is to be made for the procedure.
Dale Carnegie has written that in the lexicon of the successful man there is no such word as “failure.” So have the undertakers managed to delete the word “death” and all its associations from their vocabulary.
The funeral men hate autopsies; for one thing, it does make embalming more difficult, and also they find it harder to sell the family an expensive casket if the decedent has been autopsied.
He points to medical discoveries which have resulted from postmortem examination; but he evidently feels he is in a minority, for he says, “Most funeral directors are still ‘horse and buggy undertakers’ in their thinking and it shows up glaringly in their moronic attitude towards autopsies.”
The true purpose of embalming, he suggests, is to facilitate an open-casket funeral—with the emphasis on casket. Embalming, he suggests, is a procedure that boils down to sales and profits.
This, however, is by no means the end of the story. It is now cash-in time. The mortuaries that did take AIDS cases began charging healthy “AIDS handling fees,” usually $200 to $500.
Elsewhere, however, the AIDS surcharge persisted in one form or another, despite its illegality under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which requires funeral homes to “provide their services on a non-discriminatory basis to persons who have had AIDS.”
One crematory operator told me how they solve the problem: the lightweight metal caskets are put into the retort, where they eventually buckle and partially melt.
the price of the funeral is arrived at by marking up the wholesale casket cost anywhere from 400 to as much as 900 percent or higher. The markup is usually steepest in the lower price ranges.
Worse yet, they have begun to establish their own mortuaries for the “one-stop” funeral.
“It should be as simple as the white pall that covers a Catholic casket, signifying man’s equality and humility in death.”
