Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
The funeral industry dukes it out with independent casket dealers as Americans redefine the way they deal with death.
Jan 12, 2001 | Bucky Sanders' casket store in Hot Springs, Ark., sits near a railroad track and, appropriately enough, two cemeteries. His small shop looks more like a used auto parts store than a place where bereaved families go, but Sanders isn't trying to affect the somber formality of a funeral home. All he's selling are coffins.
Sanders has a clear and simple mission: to sell caskets cheap. He'll sell you a coffin with cherubs on the corners and the Lord's Supper on its handles for $1,800. That's half what a funeral home charges, and if you can't pay for it outright, that's fine with Sanders, who worked for 43 years at a local funeral home.
"Funeral homes demand the money on the spot," says Sanders in his Southern drawl. "A lot of people just don't have the money. I try to work with them. I think this would be pleasing to the good Lord."
Sanders buys his caskets from a company in Houston. At any one time, he has 12 to 15 of them in stock with price tags that range from $950 to $2,000, including free delivery to anywhere in Arkansas. Business is good, but pressure from funeral companies is a constant thorn in his side. It's not uncommon for Sanders to get an anxious call from a customer whose funeral home has refused to use a casket from Sanders' store. What the home is doing is against the law, Sanders tells the customer, and, in Arkansas at least, he's right.
Twenty years ago, the only way to get a casket or cremation urn was through a funeral home. Without competition, funeral directors marked up caskets as much as 700 percent, including in that lump sum the costs of the hearse, embalming, the wake and other items.
In 1984, the Federal Trade Commission forced change on the industry, requiring, among other things, that funeral homes itemize their charges. This aspect of the new regulations turned out to be a boon for funeral home directors: Instead of including multiple services in the single casket fee, businesses simply left the inflated casket prices as they were and tacked on additional charges. Subsequently, funeral costs grew 5 to 7 percent a year.
The 1984 rules also required that casket prices, manufacturers' names and model numbers be made available, and allowed independent casket dealers to get in on the market by supplying caskets directly to consumers. But in many parts of the country, that legislation remained toothless as long as states were permitted to limit the sales.
As family-owned funeral homes, once a staple of small-town life, give way to large corporations like Service Corporation International (whose allegedly unsavory dealings with Gov. George W. Bush were reported in Salon), Americans are pursuing other methods of dealing with their dead. Thanks in part to Jessica Mitford's landmark 1963 book "The American Way of Death" and its 1998 sequel, they're growing savvier to the ways of the funeral industry and challenging long-established practices.
While independent casket dealers move in on a long-protected market, families are building or designing their own caskets; they're cremating the deceased in growing numbers and burying people in "eco-burial" grounds. Baby boomers are planning their funerals as they do their lifestyles with alternative and creative choices -- designer caskets, homemade cremation urns and funky funeral services with rock 'n' roll replacing traditional religious hymns.
And as Sanders and other independent dealers fight for the right to sell their caskets to anyone who wants them, the last vestiges of the funeral industry's monopoly on the way we die are slowly being wiped away.
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