The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [51]
From the point of view of the cemetery promoter, the special attraction of pre-need selling is its self-financing feature. With little or no cash, he acquires an option on some rural acreage and has it zoned for cemetery use. He has a landscape architect supply him with sketches picturing verdant terraces, splashing fountains, tall cypresses and blooming shrubs, and broad avenues converging on an imposing central “feature” (a word used throughout the trade for “statue”), usually in a religious motif. These can be ordered by catalogue number; popular models are The Good Shepherd, Model 221-Z; Christus; The Sermon on the Mount; The Last Supper. He gets plans and drawings of his mausoleum-to-be from one of the national organizations that specialize in this form of construction. He then contracts with a sales organization that makes a specialty of pre-need selling to handle his sales, and he is in business.
The money comes rolling in, and up to this point not a spadeful of dirt has been turned at the Beautiful Memory Garden; not a cement slab has been poured at the site of the Sweet Repose Mausoleum. It is standard practice in this business not to start construction until at least one-third of all the projected burial and crypt space has been sold. Since this amount is far more than will ever be spent on development and construction, the buyers of these little burial spaces will have furnished the promoter, in advance, with all the capital he will need, and a handsome advance profit as well.
It is not as hard as one might think to extract outrageous-sounding prices from the public, because pre-need payments are customarily made in painless installments over a long period of time. The cemetery owner can, after all, afford to offer generous terms. Unlike any other commodity offered for sale on the installment plan, this one remains always in the seller’s possession, and its use may not be called for until many years after it has been paid for in full. “Sunset View’s ‘Before Need’ ownership plan offers the opportunity for purchasing family lots in monthly installments so small that they are hardly noticeable,” says a circular mailed to me by a local cemetery.
Pre-need selling is a costly proposition, and it is the customer, of course, who ultimately foots the bill. The sales organization usually works on a 50 percent commission; the individual salesman gets 20 to 40 percent of the selling price. “In most cemeteries which have pre-arrangement sales programs, four to ten times more is spent for direct selling than is spent for the total cost of planning, development, and landscaping,” complains a cemetery architect.
The major conglomerates, such as SCI, Loewen, and Stewart, are able to circumvent these high costs by advertising for salespeople, “No experience required.” The hungry hopefuls, once enticed, learn that they will be obliged to meet a sales quota set by the company—one easily met by the novices when they sign up their kith and kin, but impossible to continue once that has been done. It’s a cruel but effective way to market a community at low cost, with no regular employees, no employee benefits.
The “space and bronze deal,” as it is called by the sales specialists, is exciting, heady work. The exuberant buoyancy, the spirit of confidence, the zeal and joie de vivre reflected in the soaring prose of the American Cemetery are in marked contrast to the embattled gloom, the righteous martyrdom, that