The American Way of Death Revisited

Use of facilities for Viewing, per day $ 290

Use of facilities for Funeral Ceremony $ 315

Hearse $ 235

Flower Car $ 85

Sedan $ 115

Limo $ 120

Total for services and use of premises $3,375

To this must be added the cost of the casket—quoted by this mortuary in the $500 to $25,000 range—and the cost of the outside burial container or vault (required now by almost all cemeteries)—quoted range, $525 to $6,500.

The price list of the Pumphrey Funeral Home, Washington, D.C., is taken as an example because its prices fall within the middle range nationwide.

If the price of the cheapest steel casket—$2,000—is added, the funeral director’s bill comes to $5,375— exclusive of cemetery and outer container costs.

In the Houston, Texas, area, for example, the identical goods and services (cemetery and vault charges not included) can be had for as little as $1,585 or as much as $8,420.

The FTC makes no effort to ascertain whether funeral establishments are complying with the rule, Mr. Wright told me. However, in scattered parts of the country there are stalwart souls, mostly unpaid volunteers, who for some reason—often a firsthand run-in with an undertaker—have become obsessed with righting the wrongs inflicted by the industry. Such a one is Lisa Carlson, longtime consumer advocate on funeral issues and active in the nonprofit Vermont Memorial Society.

Vermont, with about five thousand deaths a year, is blessed or afflicted—depending on one’s point of view —with seventy funeral homes to handle these, meaning that each “home” averages just under 1.4 customers a week. In 1994 Lisa Carlson conducted a price survey covering 87 percent of the state’s funeral establishments: she found that none were in full compliance with the FTC’s Funeral Rule. After the FTC announced its new watered-down rules, the price situation deteriorated fast. In 1995 Ms. Carlson wrote a furious letter to the FTC saying that “the changes have left consumers at serious risk” and had “effectively gutted consumer protection,” since the new Funeral Rule now permits “bundling” of charges that the original rule had banned. Statewide, the already bloated nondeclinable fee had increased 28 percent in the year after the rule was amended. She cited the case of a Swanton woman whose mother’s funeral in 1993 cost $2,900. When her father died in June 1995, the identical funeral was billed at $7,100.

Five months after Gerald Wright had assured me that the FTC makes no systematic effort to discover whether funeral establishments are complying with the rule, suddenly—surprise, surprise—on July 6, 1995, the FTC came out with guns ablazing in the form of a press release headlined NATIONWIDE CRACKDOWN ON FUNERAL HOMES THAT FAIL TO PROVIDE REQUIRED CUSTOMER INFORMATION LAUNCHED BY FTC WITH STATE ATTORNEYS GENERAL. Jodie Bernstein, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, is quoted as saying that “the Commission has joined forces with state Attorneys General to switch from targeting violators based on complaints to a proactive approach designed to send a no-tolerance message and follow it up with quick and sure enforcement action.”

The proactive approach, it develops, was to send “test shoppers into funeral homes in a given area to determine whether the homes provide consumers with copies of itemized price lists.” This, of course, is precisely what Lisa Carlson and memorial society colleagues around the country had been doing for years while the FTC was soundly sleeping (in fact, of the thirty-eight actions against violators resulting in fines since promulgation of the Funeral Rule fourteen years ago, over half had been turned in by members of the consumer funeral watchdog group).

So far so good, although when one reads further it turns out that the crackdown wasn’t all that nationwide, since it involved only seven of Tennessee’s 436 funeral homes, all in Nashville; nor was it all that much of a crackdown, as only three were fined, ranging from a measly $4,000 to $16,000—sums that could handily be recouped by the funeral homes from the profits of a funeral or two.

For the next six months the FTC, perhaps exhausted from its efforts in Tennessee, lay low and said nothing. On January 16, 1996, there came another press release stating that five of Florida’s 794 funeral homes—all in Tampa—were the latest to be identified in the FTC’s response to low compliance: a nationwide “crackdown.” Four of these received fines ranging from $4,000 to $35,000; one escaped any penalty by pleading poverty. The next episode in the great nationwide crackdown came shortly thereafter, when the FTC announced a “sweep” conducted in the Delaware area. This netted five violators, four of whom were fined from $3,200 to $7,700, and the fifth again let off because of the defendant’s “financial situation.”

This, then, was the sum total of the “nationwide crackdown,” which in the course of a full year had managed to miss forty-seven states altogether, had discovered no more than seventeen of the nation’s funeral homes in violation (although the FTC had reported in 1990 that less than 30 percent of all mortuaries nationwide were in compliance), and had recovered a total of $104,000 in fines.

The question remains: Why, after years of inactivity, was the “nationwide crackdown” suddenly announced in 1995? Whose idea was it?

According to Tom Cohn, one of the FTC lawyers in charge of the “sweeps,” these questions cannot be answered: “That is not public information,” he said. One could, of course, speculate that somebody—or bodies—in the FTC had begun to feel a wee bit nervous about renewed public scrutiny: Lisa Carlson and her assiduous surveys; parallel activity in many parts of the country by other consumer advocates; a documentary about funerals on “20/20”; my interview with Gerald Wright, plus numerous calls to the FTC by Karen Leonard, my persistent research assistant….

Was the FTC’s tepid burst of activity intended to assure Congress and the consumer watchdogs generally that the commission was in the arena protecting the public interest? Or was it nothing more than a maneuver to distract attention from the agency’s shameful failure to take even a single step to curb the fraud and criminal misconduct that have become endemic in an industry engaged in fixing prices at ever higher levels and profiteering at the expense of bereaved families, and that has misappropriated hundreds of millions of dollars in funds entrusted for prepayment of funerals and cemetery property?

Here, for once, was government action which produced no outcry from the industry. The reason became clear when the Funeral Monitor, a privately circulated offshoot of Mortuary Management, in its January 29, 1996, issue reported:

NATIONAL FUNERAL DIRECTORS ASSN. AND FTC STRIKE UP A DEAL:

Funeral professionals will be pleased to know that the only national organization with the size and clout to make a deal with the federal government has negotiated a bold and innovative agreement regarding enforcement of the Funeral Rule. The old confrontational enforcement approach wasn’t a notable success, so somebody said let’s try something new.