I was a funeral director for 9 years but recently left the industry. I didn’t feel like I was helping anymore. All of the 5 funeral homes in my town are now owned by 2 corporations. Courts have ruled a corporation cannot buy out all the funeral homes in one town, so these corporations work together to divide up towns.
The main concern of corporations are things like low accounts receivables, high insurance sales, high sales of packages, and corporate stock price. Our offices had TVs that displayed these stats on a loop and ranked corpoate owned funeral homes as well as their individual staff based on these numbers. Staff with subpar numbers would be given “coachings” and “retraining”. I got a lot of those. I was coached not to “fall for sad stories” and how to judge what a person can afford by looking at the car they drove, what they were wearing, and slyly asking what they do for work.
Some of the coaching were beyond shady and straight up illegal. Local regulations required that we show our least expensive option to all clients. My bosses would instruct me to hide those options unless it was obvious the client couldn’t afford anything else. Local regulations prevented me from making untrue statements. I was told to present our premium package that 15% of people purchased as “our most popular package”. It was not. The cheap package was our most popular package, but also, most clients did not purchase a package as it was less expensive to just buy the things they wanted individually.
When I brought up that clients were unhappy, bosses would regularly tell me “So what? Are they going to go to X Funeral Home? Cause we own that one too.” The entire focus was making the KPI numbers go up. I get that this is how corporations operate, but we were selling funerals not cars. It just didn’t feel right.
My advice is to determine how important funeral services are to you. The modern day funeral is an idea crafted by funeral homes to make money. If you really like the idea, be prepared to pay for it, but don’t feel like you have to. There’s nothing wrong with organizing a small service on your own with you and close family. There’s nothing wrong with not having a tombstone. Determine how important it is to you and don’t let others pressure you into spending money on something you don’t value.
I’ve asked my loved ones to throw me onto some rich guy’s yacht and give me a Viking funeral. But seriously it sounds like you worked for a bunch of vultures. Thanks for providing people with some information to help them avoid being preyed on at an extremely vulnerable time.
The way we treat our dead, and the people coping with the grief of losing their loved ones is like number 2 on the sentience scale.
So practices like this, predation on recently bereaved family members is pretty much pulling the entire human civilisation backwards. It’s barbaric, entirely unnecessary and completely incompatible with social living.
In a civilised society, such things would be abhorrent and the people involved would be ostracised, exiled from culture; engaging with them would have been taboo.
Good on you for leaving such a system behind. When we all subscribe to such value systems we will be far better off.
Why have you not yet named these corporations? Why have you not named your boss? You continue to serve these same interests with your silence. Shame on you for it.
I don’t need to name the corporations because it’s the entire industry that sucks. All funeral homes are private for profit corporations. None are better than another. To name one would be to excuse the rest. The funeral home you need to be wary of is the one you’re using.
I liked the Speaker for the Dead from the Ender’s Game series. Instead of some guy reading off fluff about how kind they were, how they would be missed etc, they had a position called Speaker for the Dead who would speak there.
Before the funeral event, the Speaker would be like a journalist, studying to learn and understand the person who had just passed. Then the eulogy would be more of a story of the person’s life, what goals they pursued through life, etc. Explain why and who the person was. Felt kind of like the difference between just seeing the grumpy man in Up, and seeing the intro to the movie to see who he was through life and why he was grumpy now.
I wish our funerals were more like that. Let me see and understand the entire life that just ended. Let them have their story one more time.
I was a funeral director for 9 years but recently left the industry. I didn’t feel like I was helping anymore. All of the 5 funeral homes in my town are now owned by 2 corporations. Courts have ruled a corporation cannot buy out all the funeral homes in one town, so these corporations work together to divide up towns.
The main concern of corporations are things like low accounts receivables, high insurance sales, high sales of packages, and corporate stock price. Our offices had TVs that displayed these stats on a loop and ranked corpoate owned funeral homes as well as their individual staff based on these numbers. Staff with subpar numbers would be given “coachings” and “retraining”. I got a lot of those. I was coached not to “fall for sad stories” and how to judge what a person can afford by looking at the car they drove, what they were wearing, and slyly asking what they do for work.
Some of the coaching were beyond shady and straight up illegal. Local regulations required that we show our least expensive option to all clients. My bosses would instruct me to hide those options unless it was obvious the client couldn’t afford anything else. Local regulations prevented me from making untrue statements. I was told to present our premium package that 15% of people purchased as “our most popular package”. It was not. The cheap package was our most popular package, but also, most clients did not purchase a package as it was less expensive to just buy the things they wanted individually.
When I brought up that clients were unhappy, bosses would regularly tell me “So what? Are they going to go to X Funeral Home? Cause we own that one too.” The entire focus was making the KPI numbers go up. I get that this is how corporations operate, but we were selling funerals not cars. It just didn’t feel right.
My advice is to determine how important funeral services are to you. The modern day funeral is an idea crafted by funeral homes to make money. If you really like the idea, be prepared to pay for it, but don’t feel like you have to. There’s nothing wrong with organizing a small service on your own with you and close family. There’s nothing wrong with not having a tombstone. Determine how important it is to you and don’t let others pressure you into spending money on something you don’t value.
I’ve asked my loved ones to throw me onto some rich guy’s yacht and give me a Viking funeral. But seriously it sounds like you worked for a bunch of vultures. Thanks for providing people with some information to help them avoid being preyed on at an extremely vulnerable time.
Yeah, I used to think going out peacefully was the way to go, but nowadays I’m more in the camp of going out with a “bang”.
The way we treat our dead, and the people coping with the grief of losing their loved ones is like number 2 on the sentience scale.
So practices like this, predation on recently bereaved family members is pretty much pulling the entire human civilisation backwards. It’s barbaric, entirely unnecessary and completely incompatible with social living.
In a civilised society, such things would be abhorrent and the people involved would be ostracised, exiled from culture; engaging with them would have been taboo.
Good on you for leaving such a system behind. When we all subscribe to such value systems we will be far better off.
Why have you not yet named these corporations? Why have you not named your boss? You continue to serve these same interests with your silence. Shame on you for it.
I don’t need to name the corporations because it’s the entire industry that sucks. All funeral homes are private for profit corporations. None are better than another. To name one would be to excuse the rest. The funeral home you need to be wary of is the one you’re using.
I liked the Speaker for the Dead from the Ender’s Game series. Instead of some guy reading off fluff about how kind they were, how they would be missed etc, they had a position called Speaker for the Dead who would speak there.
Before the funeral event, the Speaker would be like a journalist, studying to learn and understand the person who had just passed. Then the eulogy would be more of a story of the person’s life, what goals they pursued through life, etc. Explain why and who the person was. Felt kind of like the difference between just seeing the grumpy man in Up, and seeing the intro to the movie to see who he was through life and why he was grumpy now.
I wish our funerals were more like that. Let me see and understand the entire life that just ended. Let them have their story one more time.