The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [103]
Vermont, with about five thousand deaths a year, is blessed or afflicted—depending on one’s point of view—with seventy funeral homes to handle these, meaning that each “home” averages just under 1.4 customers a week. In 1994 Lisa Carlson conducted a price survey covering 87 percent of the state’s funeral establishments: she found that none were in full compliance with the FTC’s Funeral Rule. After the FTC announced its new watered-down rules, the price situation deteriorated fast. In 1995 Ms. Carlson wrote a furious letter to the FTC saying that “the changes have left consumers at serious risk” and had “effectively gutted consumer protection,” since the new Funeral Rule now permits “bundling” of charges that the original rule had banned. Statewide, the already bloated nondeclinable fee had increased 28 percent in the year after the rule was amended. She cited the case of a Swanton woman whose mother’s funeral in 1993 cost $2,900. When her father died in June 1995, the identical funeral was billed at $7,100.
Five months after Gerald Wright had assured me that the FTC makes no systematic effort to discover whether funeral establishments are complying with the rule, suddenly—surprise, surprise—on July 6, 1995, the FTC came out with guns ablazing in the form of a press release headlined NATIONWIDE CRACKDOWN ON FUNERAL HOMES THAT FAIL TO PROVIDE REQUIRED CUSTOMER INFORMATION LAUNCHED BY FTC WITH STATE ATTORNEYS GENERAL. Jodie Bernstein, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, is quoted as saying that “the Commission has joined forces with state Attorneys General to switch from targeting violators based on complaints to a proactive approach designed to send a no-tolerance message and follow it up with quick and sure enforcement action.”
The proactive approach, it develops, was to send “test shoppers into funeral homes in a given area to determine whether the homes provide consumers with copies of itemized price lists.” This, of course, is precisely what Lisa Carlson and memorial society colleagues around the country had been doing for years while the FTC was soundly sleeping (in fact, of the thirty-eight actions against violators resulting in fines since promulgation of the Funeral Rule fourteen years ago, over half had been turned in by members of the consumer funeral watchdog group).
So far so good, although when one reads further it turns out that the crackdown wasn’t all that nationwide, since it involved only seven of Tennessee’s 436 funeral homes, all in Nashville; nor was it all that much of a crackdown, as only three were fined, ranging from a measly $4,000 to $16,000—sums that could handily be recouped by the funeral homes from the profits of a funeral or two.
For the next six months the FTC, perhaps exhausted from its efforts in Tennessee, lay low and said nothing. On January 16, 1996, there came another press release stating that five of Florida’s 794 funeral homes—all in Tampa—were the latest to be identified in the FTC’s response to low compliance: a nationwide “crackdown.” Four of these received fines ranging from $4,000 to $35,000; one escaped any penalty by pleading poverty. The next episode in the great nationwide crackdown came shortly thereafter, when the FTC announced a “sweep” conducted in the Delaware area. This netted five violators, four of whom were fined from $3,200 to $7,700, and the fifth again let off because of the defendant’s “financial situation.”
This, then, was the sum total of the “nationwide crackdown,” which in the course of a full year had managed to miss forty-seven states altogether, had discovered no more than seventeen of the nation’s funeral homes in violation (although the FTC had reported in 1990 that less than 30 percent of all mortuaries nationwide were in compliance), and had recovered