Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
"I get sick of seeing people being ripped off," says Rick Dancy of Meridian, Miss., who recently earned the distinction of being the first man in the United States to be imprisoned for selling caskets from an independent dealership. A court later found the arrest unconstitutional, and Dancy continues to sell the caskets that he buys from Casket Royale, a New Hampshire wholesaler that has dealers in 44 states.
"There's no sense in people having to pay double for a casket just so the funeral homes can make a good profit. A casket store puts the power back to the people," Dancy says.
In effect, Dancy, Sanders and other independent casket dealers are reversing the consolidation of the funeral industry that took place over the past century or so.
The tradition of the funeral home dates back to the Civil War, when soldiers' bodies were embalmed before undergoing the long transport back home to their families. Initially, this task belonged to the coffin maker, often a local furniture dealer who took on the job of preparing a body for burial. As Americans began to cluster in urban centers and move into smaller apartments, it became necessary to find surrogate "homes" in which to hold wakes. Thus funeral homes were established, soon becoming single-stop outlets for funeral services -- embalming, viewing, hearse, flowers, casket.
For much of the century, the funeral industry faced little competition. The death of a lover or family member proved enough of a preoccupation to keep families from shopping around or demanding alternatives to the options funeral homes gave them. Even today funeral homes exploit families' grief to extract high fees. According to Lisa Carlson, president of Funeral and Memorial Societies of America, the cheapest casket on the market is a $150 cloth-covered particleboard box that many funeral homes resell in the $695-$895 range. Funeral directors, when telling families about their options, commonly call this the "welfare box," effectively shaming families into buying a pricier model.
Over the past few years states have slowly opened up the market to independent casket dealers. Today, only six states -- Louisiana, Alabama, Idaho, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Virginia -- prohibit casket sales by independent dealers.
In November, Mississippi was crossed off that list when a federal judge struck down the law that had allowed casket sales only by licensed funeral directors. The state had argued that its law addressed health concerns because human remains need to be buried quickly. But the judge rejected that claim, saying he was skeptical that "possible ignorance or incompetence of an unlicensed dealer would delay burial, as such a dealer is selling what amounts to be a glorified box."
The casket war has also hit South Carolina, where a judge recently struck down the requirement that casket dealers have embalming rooms, chapels and hearses. To sell caskets, however, a person must still be a licensed funeral director. And in August, a federal judge ruled that Tennessee's funeral director law violated the 14th Amendment's protection from arbitrary regulation.
A federal court also recently tossed out a Georgia law prohibiting casket sales by any entity other than a funeral home, calling the law a blatant restraint of trade. In a desperate attempt to keep its regulations alive, the state argued that allowing independent casket dealers to engage in a price war would "promote the criminal element" -- in other words, that the easy availability of caskets would encourage murder.
The country's traditional coffin makers -- Batesville Casket Co. and Aurora Casket Co., both of Indiana -- still sell wholesale only to licensed funeral directors. Casket Royale has grown to be the world's largest provider of caskets to third-party funeral merchandisers -- and is a major force behind moves to open up independent casket sales in the South. The company currently services independently owned and operated retail funeral stores; it also sells directly to the public.
"We sell at least one a day to consumers," said Mark Ginsberg, president of Casket Royale, which likes to tout itself as the Wal-Mart of the funeral industry. "We advertise on TV about 60 times a day. People are tired of being dictated to by the funeral industry."
These days, more bereaved families are becoming savvy about funeral services -- saving hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars when they shop to compare prices.
The National Funeral Directors Association reports that the average amount spent in 1999 for a funeral was $5,778.16, with $2,176.46 of that going toward the casket and $1,000 for cemetery charges. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' consumer expenditure survey, funeral spending is on the decline, dropping an average of 7 percent annually since the mid-1980s. Some industry experts say the high cost of dying is why cremation is on the rise nationwide, even in the South, where traditional burial is usually preferred.
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