Wife upsells computers, I upsell stuffed animals. Yeah, that might seem backwards.
Anyway, daughter wants to become a funeral director, and thinks that we think it’s icky. Okay, it is, as I have always preferred corpses that were old and dry, but Wife x-rayed her share of floaters. But I read that book many years ago and it seems not much has changed in 50 years. Sure, they are the very Gods of the Upsell, but upselling the bereaved seems, er, cheating. But in general it is a needed profession for any Mr Boddy who isn’t a whole-boddy donor to a Boddy Farm (still need to fill out the paperwork as I’d rather be laid out in Hawaii than Tennessee, but TN is closer and I’d cost extra to ship).
Anyway, we have at least one person here who grew up in the profession. Is it any less sleazy? Do they still insist you need a casket to be cremated? And how could she get her start, other than apprenticing with a local guy, who actually is a sleaze? (Consorting with prostitutes, but I don’t believe caskets were involved. I’d remember a detail like that.)
Well, the bodies are much better done. It used to be you might not recognize them. Now if you didn’t know them 20 years ago, you still might not. No problem, just watch the slide shows. I really have a problem with it all. I think even non Christians realize that their body isn’t them. Even if you believe when you are gone, you are gone, how much does that idealized body mean?
I think in my state a body must be embalmed before being creamated.
I had another cancer tumor chopped out last week. My minister drove me home. I commented on how many sand filters we could buy for the Africian villages without clean water for the price of a funeral. I always wanted to go to medical school. I have the handwriting to be a doctor.
But, apparently, not the (old skool) mortician’s sales skills.
“Sorry, Mrs Dude, but we are going to toss Lab in a hole in the ground, but not near an aquifer, and use your money to save countless African children.”
The funeral-home industry has become much more consolidated than it used to be, and many of what look like local businesses are actually part of large multistate companies. On the other hand, caskets are available from a broader range of sellers, including via Amazon.
But it’s still true that for most folk the first time they think about a casket is after a loved one dies, and the first person they talk about it with is a funeral director.
Very true, and a shame. People could save their loved ones a lot of money by comparison-shopping among funeral homes and other services before the time comes.
Please note, though, that one of Amazon’s most affordable coffins apparently arrives as a kit, and would require assembly. It might not be a good choice unless one of your survivors is handy in that way.
I’m not sure what your point is. Do you believe your daughter is an unethical person? There is no job that requires you to be unethical.
You might say an accountant is in an excellent position to fleece someone. And we hear in the celebrity gossip that they do so, bankrupting even the famously wealthy. Is this a good reason not to become an accountant? It seems a little ridiculous to me.
I am not a funeral director, just the grand-daughter of such.
Personal ethics vary from one funeral director to another, just as in any other profession. We mostly hear about the scuzzballs because those are the ones that wind up in the news. On top of that, death is seen as icky by many.
Yes, funeral directors do profit off the death of others. If they didn’t earn a profit they wouldn’t stay in business. They do provide a useful service both for the disposal of human remains and for serving the needs of the bereaved. One of the issues of being in the business is that the bereaved so often have very different needs. Some families find loud, public grief to be cathartic. Others are quite reserved and private. A funeral director has to accommodate everyone’s needs.
My most recent experience with such people was upon the demise of my mother. The two gentlemen (and they very much were gentlemen) who arrived to collect her body were extremely professional and cognizant of the feelings of the grieving. Among other nice touches, they made sure to ask my father about reclaiming any jewelry mom might have been wearing, asked if perhaps he’d like a lock of her as a remembrance, made sure anyone who wished to see her before the removal had had the chance to do, when they were putting her on the carrier they were very careful to make sure her nightie didn’t slide up, and basically treated the body with the same care and respect you would do a living person. Mom was cremated, and no, we weren’t required to purchase a coffin. The funeral home/crematory we used specializes in, for lack of a better term, low budget affairs. They were genuinely concerned about providing services at a reasonable cost. They certainly made us aware of options, up to and including full blown funerals with lavish accoutrements, but once we settled on a very restrained affair there was no hard sell or pressure to upgrade. Then again, these arrangements were made in advance of the death.
Basically, there are ethical funeral homes out there interested in providing a service rather than soaking the grieving for every possible penny. Make no mistake, they’re still for-profit operations, but that doesn’t mean they’re exploitative. Assuming your daughter is basically an ethical person to start with there’s no reason she can’t be one of those people. It’s not a profession for everyone, but a good funeral director really can provide an outlet for grief and genuinely help the grieving make “final arrangements” in an ethical manner.
And that’s where you start, with descriptions of the features, but maybe they have the idea they might want something else they heard of. Upselling is not, by its nature, evil. Done ethically, it helps you get the customer what he really wants.
Daughter is not unethical (though if you lie down with pigs…;)). It’s just that the funeral biz had such a terrible reputation that I was wondering what safeguards have been put in place.
However, and this is beside the point of this thread but is something a dad might think, she has never been in the presence of the dead and I’m not sure she knows what she is getting into. Maybe if she got a ride-around with one of the local, NON-horndog ones she might get a better idea. She does make a valid point in that the skills learned in anatomy and business classes is portable.
The funeral homes–and directors–I dealt with for both of my parents (in 1993 and 2010) were both very helpful and non-pushy. In both cases, we opted for cremation, no embalming, no coffin, and we did not feel at all pressured or looked down-upon. My mother’s funeral home even let me put her favorite lipstick on her before she was cremated (she never went *anywhere *without her lipstick on).
I was cleaning out her room at the nursing home and one of the nurses said to me, “She’s gone to a Better Place.” “I know,” I replied. “Goldstein’s.”
