The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [43]
And Mr. Leroy R. Derr, president of the Boyertown Casket Company:
We can make cheaper caskets, certainly. You can make them and so can I. However, each one helps underwrite the failure of our funeral directors. Too many “cheapies” will ruin the funeral directors completely.
So well did the anti-cheapie program succeed that sales of metal caskets soared. The significance of this industry-engineered change in funeral fashions lies in the circumstance that the wholesale cost of a metal “sealer” casket is today $350, while a cloth-covered softwood wholesales at about $160. Grained-hardwood caskets, which wholesale on an average for about as much as metal ones, have held their own over the years, accounting for about 15 percent of unit sales. The metals, however, which can be mass-produced more cheaply than the hardwoods, are the ones that are pushed most vigorously by the manufacturers.
Here again, what is good for one segment of the burial business has its odd and painful repercussions in another. So enthusiastically are metal caskets pushed that fairly often they are sold even in cases where the deceased is to be cremated. This is most irksome to the crematories, whose equipment—designed for the expeditious combustion of wood—is not geared to the combustion of metal receptacles.
One crematory operator told me how they solve the problem: the lightweight metal caskets are put into the retort, where they eventually buckle and partially melt. “The remains are actually baked,” he explained. The heavier and costlier grades cannot be disposed of in this way because they are likely to ruin the crematory equipment. The body is removed from this type of casket and cremated as is—which leaves the problem of disposing of the casket. “State law prohibits the reuse of them,” the crematory operator said. “You can’t very well take it out to the city dump, because what if the family should happen to pass by and see it there? So we have to break them up and scrap them.”
The significance to the consumer of wholesale casket costs lies in the use of “formula pricing,” which means in its simplest application that the price of the funeral is arrived at by marking up the wholesale casket cost anywhere from 400 to as much as 900 percent or higher. The markup is usually steepest in the lower price ranges.
Funeral directors have always been jealous guardians of the secrets of wholesale costs. The first official act of the California Undertakers and Funeral Directors Association at its founding convention in 1882 was the adoption of a resolution “that this Association earnestly request all manufacturers and wholesale dealers in undertakers’ goods … to refrain from sending out catalogues and price lists to any parties who are not undertakers or funeral directors in good standing.” Seventy years later, this concern was still uppermost; Mortuary Management in 1952 reported, “The National Funeral Directors Association has for a number of years had a policy which states that all catalogues, catalogue sheets, and other advertisements which give wholesale prices for funeral merchandise, when mailed, should be sent in sealed envelopes as first class mail.” The same policy applies to funeral directors who mail price lists offering shipping services, embalming services, etc.
Over the years, the occasional hardy storefront casket retailer attempted to compete with the mortuaries in the sale of caskets. These efforts largely failed because the mortuaries resorted to various anticompetitive measures, among them the imposition of a “casket handling fee” when the casket was purchased from a third party. When in 1994 the FTC adopted a rule