The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [42]
Everyone enjoyed the performance except the funeral directors, who were there en masse. The bills passed and were signed into law, the first such legislation in the nation.
7
The Allied Industries
The undertaker, who pockets slightly more than half of the funeral dollar, has generally drawn the spotlight upon himself when the high cost of dying has come under scrutiny. But he is not the whole show. Behind the scenes, waiting for their cue, are the cemeteries, florists, monument makers, vault manufacturers. The casket-manufacturing companies, to whom the undertakers are perennially and heavily in debt, are often lurking in the wings like ambitious understudies waiting to move in and assume control of the funeral establishments should financial disaster strike.
The cast in this drama is not always one big happy family. There are the usual backstage displays of irritation, pique, jealousy, a certain vying and jockeying for position. There are lawsuits and scathing denunciations which arise because of the stiff competition. These can be submerged in the interests of a common endeavor, for the show must go on, and the common goal must be served: that of extracting the maximum admission fee from the paying audience.
The casket companies reported that the alarming condition of the industry’s accounts receivable was “far more aggravated in the casket field than in any other manufacturing endeavor.” Back in 1961, the funeral establishments owed the casket makers more than $39 million, 20 percent of the year’s production, an amount equal to about 317,000 caskets, of which, groaned the creditors, some 40 percent had “already been interred!” Presumably making repossession a most inconvenient remedy for the creditor.
The answer to this problem is, of course, to sell in ever-higher brackets. As Herbert L. Stein, vice president of the National Casket Company and president of the Casket Manufacturers Association, said, “Since the public’s purse limits funeral expenditures and nature limits the number of funerals … skillful merchandising of quality goods is about the only avenue for upping profits anywhere along the line.”
Selling the public on the “quality” of his merchandise can tax the ingenuity of the undertaker. The costliest caskets are those built of the thickest metal. The cheaper lines of metal caskets, constructed of thin sheet metal over a wooden frame, achieve the same look of massive elegance, and can hardly be distinguished (except by grateful pallbearers) from the heavyweights that weigh hundreds of pounds more and sell for thousands of dollars more. A writer in Mortuary Management described the average run of lightweight metal caskets as “nothing more or less than stovepipes. Stovepipe gauges are always misleading the public.… ‘Metal is metal,’ says John Public.”
The method hit upon by the casket makers to solve this knotty problem is essentially the method used by furniture manufacturers (whose direct descendants they are): that is, to make the cheaper lines so hideous that only customers who can afford the barest minimum will buy them. Mr. John Beck, then president of the Balanced Line Casket Company and of Elgin Associates,* carefully explained the position:
In most cases where funeral directors are not showing enough profit, they are showing too many low price metal caskets that look too good, are embellished up entirely too much for their price position.… We call the items “profit robbers.” For right in the area where people do have the money to buy better funerals and