The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [97]
Among all the uncertainties of life there is one constant. Funeral directors smile, exude friendliness, purr compassion and have great respect for the priest. I never thought of these sweet folks as anything but gentle and deferential. Then I saw them transfigured before me.… Something akin to guerrilla war broke out in our church.… The funeral industry is big business. Maybe they own the parish church and nobody told us.
Mortuary Management soon had reason to bewail an even more egregious instance of clerical meddlesomeness. The setting is Phoenix, Arizona, where a parish priest has likewise barred mortuary personnel from the church, asserting that “there is no need for delivery men unaccustomed to Catholic liturgy and not members of the family or the parish to insert themselves into our sacred liturgy and procession when they are not needed and are not requested to do so by the priest.” The latter voice is unmistakably that of Father Henry Wasielewski.
Fifteen years ago, outraged by the high cost of dying, Father Henry felt called upon to do something about it. Aware that the key to any solution lay in consumer education and in penetrating the highly secret wholesale price of coffins, he organized the Interfaith Funeral Information Committee (IFIC), an ecumenical task force consisting of local clergy, social workers, and community leaders to study the industry. Starting modestly, the committee opened an information hot line. Two telephone lines were installed, one for taped messages in Spanish and one in English. Callers were given the names of five funeral homes which offered complete funerals for $650. Surveys by the committee disclosed that some mortuaries in the area were charging as much as $1,800 for the identical product.
Since those early days, Father Henry, with extraordinary dedication and energy, has gone on-line, extending his information network to a nationwide audience.
An example of the facts and figures he offers includes a mind-bogglingly exhaustive price survey of 120 funeral homes in the Houston, Texas, area. To establish a basis for comparison, he uses the following guidelines:
• a retail casket price of $428 to $600—metal, with a choice of three colors—(the wholesale cost is $285; a markup of 50 percent to 100 percent is reasonable, he says)
• a reasonable service charge for a “traditional” funeral—$800 to $1,400
• a reasonable price range for a complete funeral including metal casket, choice of colors, embalming, and viewing—$1,450 to $2,500.
Father Henry has found sixteen mortuaries in the area that will provide a complete funeral for the recommended maximum sum of $2,500 or less, and lists them in his report. Also listed are three casket retailers that will deliver a designated casket to the mortuary as priced above.
There follow price lists for the next hundred Houston-area establishments, whose charges for the same products and services run from $3,000 to $9,910. The casket markup for some of these is more than five times the wholesale cost.
The establishments in the highest bracket—$7,000 to $9,910 for the same services and commodities—are:
Forest Park Westheimer $7,020
Waltrip Funeral Directors $7,133
Settegast-Kopf $7,161
Memorial Oaks $7,595
Forest Park Lawndale $8,309
Settegast-Kopf-Kirby $8,420
George Lewis Funeral Directors $9,910
These are of interest because all seven are owned by the giant conglomerate Service Corporation International (SCI). Robert Waltrip is founder and chairman of the board of SCI.
Close on the heels of SCI is the Loewen Group, second-largest corporate consolidator in North America, represented by five Houston-area mortuaries, all quoting a uniform minimum price of $5,990.
Although the major consolidators have in the past shown a preference for high-end sales and have invested money to better attract high-end consumers by improving the appearance of the physical plant, it should by no means be assumed that the low-end public is being neglected. Low-end mortuaries