The American Way of Death Revisited

the paying audience.

The casket companies reported that the alarming condition of the industry’s accounts receivable was “far more aggravated in the casket field than in any other manufacturing endeavor.” Back in 1961, the funeral establishments owed the casket makers more than $39 million, 20 percent of the year’s production, an amount equal to about 317,000 caskets, of which, groaned the creditors, some 40 percent had “already been interred!” Presumably making repossession a most inconvenient remedy for the creditor.

The answer to this problem is, of course, to sell in ever-higher brackets. As Herbert L. Stein, vice president of the National Casket Company and president of the Casket Manufacturers Association, said, “Since the public’s purse limits funeral expenditures and nature limits the number of funerals… skillful merchandising of quality goods is about the only avenue for upping profits anywhere along the line.”

Selling the public on the “quality” of his merchandise can tax the ingenuity of the undertaker. The costliest caskets are those built of the thickest metal. The cheaper lines of metal caskets, constructed of thin sheet metal over a wooden frame, achieve the same look of massive elegance, and can hardly be distinguished (except by grateful pallbearers) from the heavyweights that weigh hundreds of pounds more and sell for thousands of dollars more. A writer in Mortuary Management described the average run of lightweight metal caskets as “nothing more or less than stovepipes. Stovepipe gauges are always misleading the public…. ‘Metal is metal,’ says John Public.”

The method hit upon by the casket makers to solve this knotty problem is essentially the method used by furniture manufacturers (whose direct descendants they are): that is, to make the cheaper lines so hideous that only customers who can afford the barest minimum will buy them. Mr. John Beck, then president of the Balanced Line Casket Company and of Elgin Associates,[5] carefully explained the position:

In most cases where funeral directors are not showing enough profit, they are showing too many low price metal caskets that look too good, are embellished up entirely too much for their price position…. We call the items “profit robbers.” For right in the area where people do have the money to buy better funerals and will do so when given the proper selection and opportunity, the better sale is lost. The second area where opportunity is lost is in the sealer[6] area. If the lowest price sealer looks as good as the best one, of course most people will buy the lowest price one…. This is the region where greater profits can be made as this is the one where people who have the money to buy will do so if they are given the proper incentive.

And Mr. Leroy R. Derr, president of the Boyertown Casket Company:

We can make cheaper caskets, certainly. You can make them and so can I. However, each one helps underwrite the failure of our funeral directors. Too many “cheapies” will ruin the funeral directors completely.

So well did the anti-cheapie program succeed that sales of metal caskets soared. The significance of this industry-engineered change in funeral fashions lies in the circumstance that the wholesale cost of a metal “sealer” casket is today $350, while a cloth-covered softwood wholesales at about $160. Grained-hardwood caskets, which wholesale on an average for about as much as metal ones, have held their own over the years, accounting for about 15 percent of unit sales. The metals, however, which can be mass-produced more cheaply than the hardwoods, are the ones that are pushed most vigorously by the manufacturers.

Here again, what is good for one segment of the burial business has its odd and painful repercussions in another. So enthusiastically are metal caskets pushed that fairly often they are sold even in cases where the deceased is to be cremated. This is most irksome to the crematories, whose equipment—designed for the expeditious combustion of wood—is not geared to the combustion of metal receptacles.

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 remains are actually baked,” he explained. The heavier and costlier grades cannot be disposed of in this way because they are likely to ruin the crematory equipment. The body is removed from this type of casket and cremated as is—which leaves the problem of disposing of the casket. “State law prohibits the reuse of them,” the crematory operator said. “You can’t very well take it out to the city dump, because what if the family should happen to pass by and see it there? So we have to break them up and scrap them.”

The significance to the consumer of wholesale casket costs lies in the use of “formula pricing,” which means in its simplest application that 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.

Funeral directors have always been jealous guardians of the secrets of wholesale costs. The first official act of the California Undertakers and Funeral Directors Association at its founding convention in 1882 was the adoption of a resolution “that this Association earnestly request all manufacturers and wholesale dealers in undertakers’ goods… to refrain from sending out catalogues and price lists to any parties who are not undertakers or funeral directors in good standing.” Seventy years later, this concern was still uppermost; Mortuary Management in 1952 reported, “The National Funeral Directors Association has for a number of years had a policy which states that all catalogues, catalogue sheets, and other advertisements which give wholesale prices for funeral merchandise, when mailed, should be sent in sealed envelopes as first class mail.” The same policy applies to funeral directors who mail price lists offering shipping services, embalming services, etc.

Over the years, the occasional hardy storefront casket retailer attempted to compete with the mortuaries in the sale of caskets. These efforts largely failed because the mortuaries resorted to various anticompetitive measures, among them the imposition of a “casket handling fee” when the casket was purchased from a third party. When in 1994 the FTC adopted a rule prohibiting the practice, retail casket sellers, offering substantial discounts, began to flourish. The media—fascinated by the trend—provided publicity, and consumers began to shop around.

Industry response was predictable. Gordon Fairclough in the Wall Street Journal interviewed a funeral director in the neighborhood of one new casket emporium. The mortician reports that he met the competition by the simple expedient of lowering his casket prices while at the same time raising his service fees.

The conflict between cemetery and funeral director is of a different nature, for they are in direct competition for the dead man’s dollar. The funeral director is here in the choice position, since he ordinarily gets to the prospect first. By the time he gets through with him, there won’t be much money left over for a grave. The cemetery people come in a poor second, often finding that by the time their particular commodity is offered to the prospect, the funeral director has skimmed the cream from the top. He has not only induced the bereaved family to spend its all on the casket, but he may steer them away from direct contact with the cemetery and take it upon himself to order a cheap grave by telephone. This can all be very annoying and not at all good for grave sales.

The American Cemetery reports a discussion on “immediate-need” selling in which suggestions were made about how the cemeteries can get around this problem. The first thing is to insist that the family make a personal visit to the cemetery and not permit the purchase of the grave to be handled through the funeral director. Mr. David E. Linge, executive vice president of Cedar Memorial Park, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is quoted as saying: “We don’t feel a funeral director’s position is such that he can call a cemetery and say, ‘Open a thirty- five-dollar single [at least $350 today],’ any more than we would call him and say, ‘Provide the family with your hundred-dollar casket [$1,000 or more today].’ For that reason we will not take, under any circumstances, a sale over the telephone in an at-need situation.”

The funeral director should, however, be asked to supply as much information as possible about the family —“their names, relationship to the deceased, financial background, social and economic status in the community.” Once he has done so, the article continues, he can safely be dismissed while the arrangements proceed. At this time the funeral director is tactfully drawn away from the family group, since Mr. Linge feels that “as a matter of professional courtesy, he should not be present at the conference.”

The family visit also gives the cemetery personnel an opportunity “to describe its other services, such as bronze memorials, flowers, mausoleum crypts and cremation facilities.” If the family does not buy a memorial then and there, chances are they will do so in the very near future; for Cedar Memorial Park has a “carefully planned