Republished with Permission from the Funeralization Blog.
This is where you will learn what the funeral chains and funeral corporations, and their lackey the Federal Trade Commission (the federal agency that approves interstate mergers) do not want you to know.
And I have a bridge to sell you…
While you were texting or farting around on Facebook, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was selling you out to the funeral corporations. Keep texting and finding “friends” on Facebook and they’ll be composting you for the Whitehouse flowerbeds! Well, that’s one of the directions the death industry is taking if a Seattle project moves forward. The project is called the Urban Death Project, and it describes the process of turning dead humans into food (A Seattle based eco-friendly ‘initiative’ proposes a radical solution for urban food production: using human corpses as compost to feed crops). And then there’s freeze-drying and pulverization, then packaging. Or you can go for “resomation”, that is, dissolving the body and flushing it down to the sewers. It’s a market economy and it gets as weird as the weirdest ones among us. That’s because our government is handing over control to the corporations who will titillate and tantalize you to buy just about anything, if it means happy shareholders, big dividends, and profit. The Federal Trade Commission is handing over consumers’ choice to the huge corporations, including your deathcare choices.
This is where you’re at now.
In her book “American Way of Death” (1963) Jessica Mitford stunned America with vivid accounts of corruption and abuse in the death industry; in the updated sequel she revised some of her findings as the “American Way of Death Revisited”, published after Mitford’s death in 1996. Mitford didn’t change her opinion to any substantial degree. Nevertheless and by any standard of literary criticism, Mitford’s book was extremely biased by her problematic background, and was written by an obviously very disordered person, resulting in the book becoming a bestseller in the United States. Of course. But that was a time when America still had a hypocrite’s sense of decency, moral and ethical substance, and values. A lot has changed since Mitford published her books; America no longer has even a hypocrite’s sensitivities, only a chronic anxiety and paranoia inspired by rampant greed, dissatisfaction, denial and suspicion. We’ve come a long way in those 30 or so years, haven’t we?
One of the significant developments, however, one that is anecdotally attributed to Mitford’s muckraking and biased exposé, was the action taken by the Federal Trade Commission with its so-called Funeral Rule, requiring disclosure of a General Price List by funeral homes. The Rule requires funeral homes to provide consumers with accurate, itemized price information and various other disclosures about funeral goods and services. Another interesting observation is that Mitford’s rants in 1963, and her revised rants in 1998 were, to some appreciable extent, prophetic— what in 1963-98 was “muckraking” and biased is true reality in 2017 — but the key players have changed.
Or Final Rites
With the growth of the “Walmart-style” [click here to read our article] funeral home chains and factory funeral home groups like Newcomer Funeral Service Group (HQ in Topeka, Kansas) and its Newcomer Funerals and Cremations (locally in Albany and Latham), Service Corporation International (SCI) a.k.a. Dignity Memorial, StoneMor , and others (See “10 Companies that Control the Death Industry”). Families are manipulated into buying expensive goods and services they don’t need or want. Prepaid funeral money vanishes into thin air. Body parts are sold on the black market. Eight states force families to pay a funeral director even if they conduct a home funeral with no need for help from outsiders — not that we are suggesting you should start doing DYI funerals at home without some expert inputs, we do object to the “requirement to pay” for services not necessarily needed. But a consumer movement is now awakening, and Americans are asserting their rights over a key part of life, just as they did in the past with the natural childbirth and right-to-die movements. The two most prominent leaders of that movement are the authors of the book Final Rights: Reclaiming the American Way of Death, Joshua Slocum, executive director of Funeral Consumers Alliance, and Lisa Carlson, executive director of Funeral Ethics Organization. In the book they join forces to expose wrongdoing, inform consumers of their rights, and propose legal reforms. The book includes state-by-state summaries of laws, regulations, services, and consumer concerns. (Final Rights: Reclaiming the American Way of Death by Josh Slocum and Lisa Carlson; for other resources please see Funeral Consumers Alliance). Again, you have to be interested to pick up the book; and we advise caution whenever you read someone else’s interpretations, but it’s certainly better than continuing blindly.
Synergy Means the Corps get More Control for their Investment!
You’ve probably heard enough about Newcomer Funeral Service Group with its chain funeral homes in Albany and Latham, NY, and their questionable practices, smokescreen advertising, and irresponsible hiring practices so we’ll move on to more dangerous species of lurkers with their eyes on your credit card. This time we’ll go after Service Corporation International (SCI) who is known to consumers as Dignity Memorial, an addition you’ll probably see alongside the familiar family funeral home names that they’ve gobbled up. See Dignity Memorial, think Service Corporation International and think of a funeral-Walmart with more than 2,100 locations across the US, Canada, Puerto Rico and controlling more than 15% of the death market in the US. Think about a greedy corporation that is continuously grabbing for more and giving less. And we’ll look at another resident of the corporate Ghouls Gulch, StoneMor Partners, who are in the cemeteries acquisition business.
Synergy is the concept that the value and performance of two companies combined will be greater than the sum of the separate individual parts.
