My exploration of the funeral industry has hugely contributed to its figurative professional menopause, which in turn brought about an industry-wide hatred of me and book’s revealing of the horrors within it. Unfortunately, the majority of funeral services remain full of manipulative marketing antics, if not more so. Their antics include gaging the cost of their products based on their speculations of family’s ability to pay, hiding as many facts as possible from their clients, taking advantage of the survivors’ ignorance, grief and need and desire to make significant financial decisions on the spot. They fabricate laws to guarantee expensive practices and products such as embalming, caskets and vaults. They justify their high prices by pretending that the prices includes the services of newspaper organizations, grave-diggers, and churches, and by exaggerating the number of hours they spend on a given funeral. Their reasoning for their various ridiculous practices is that they are part of a sacred “American Tradition”, that the casket must match the appearance of the body which must match the body’s dress which must match the vault (all of which must be impeccable for the sake of respecting the dead body and preventing emotional and mental scarring of the surviving loved ones), that the money spent on a dead body reflects the amount of love and respect the survivors have for the deceased, that avoidance of such practices is illegal and hazardous to public health, and that emotional catharsis is provided through correct ceremony. The general absence of informational texts on the subject of funeral services allows and encourages the industry to strive for its common goal: extract as much profit as possible from funeral-seekers.
Quotes I Enjoyed:
- "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' ' " (page 24).
- "...Cremation of an un-coffined body is prohibited under California Law. This was said in all three cases with such a ring of conviction that I began to doubt the evidence before my eyes in the state code" (page 27).
- " 'I sell vaults. I listened to Mrs. Mitford's speech and seh never said that when Jesus Christ our Lord was crucified, a rich man gave him his vault'...to my pleasure, not a soul stirred. They were all keen to discuss their mother's funeral" (page 37).
- "In an era when huge television audiences watch surgical operations in the comfort of their living rooms, when, thanks to the animated cartoon, the geography of the digestive system has become familiar territory even to the nursery-school set, in a land where the satisfaction of curiousity about almost all matters is a national past-time, surely the secretness of embalming cannot be attributed to the inherent gruesomeness of the subject" (page 44).
- "How true; once the blood is removed, chances of live burial are indeed remote" (page 46).
I am continually befuddled by the twisted logic of funeral directors. Either they lack a collective consciounce that would keep them from their continually deceptive ways, or Mitford was right when she said that the industry had "hypnotized" itself into believing its propaganda. For example, a supporter of the funeral industry promoted the practice of embalming because the lessened the number of deaths in the US can be attributed to embalming by 50%. Not only is this probably lacking in evidence (where did he get that statistic? Is that even quantifiable?), but by his logic embalming is ultimately hurting the business because the funeral industry's profit is very dependent on the numberof deaths in the US (the only country that embalms). This kind of reasoning continually arises in industry, according to the book. Society's profound ignorance of this business fuels this logic I think, because a few simple questions can reveal the reasoning of funeral directors to be anything but legitimate.
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