funeral home. There he found that the cheapest price, including “a low-priced casket and the complete services,” was $480. Mr. Rhoades protested that he did not want the complete services, that there was to be no embalming, that he did not want to see the coffin. He merely wanted the body removed from the rest home and taken to the crematorium, some five miles away. Balking at the $480, Mr. Rhoades returned home and telephoned the other four funeral establishments. The lowest quotation he could obtain was $250.
Not unnaturally, Mr. Rhoades felt that he had paid a fee of $50 a mile to have his friend’s body moved from the rest home to the crematorium. The undertaker no doubt felt, for his part, that he had furnished a service at well below his “break-even” point, or, in his own terminology, “below the cost at which we are fully compensated.” *
The point of view of the funeral director must here be explored. In 1962 I talked with Mr. Robert MacNeur, owner of a Grant Miller Mortuary, the largest funeral establishment in the Oakland area, with a volume of one thousand funerals a year. Their cheapest offering at the time was the standard service with redwood casket, at $485. “My firm has never knowingly subjected a person to financial hardship,” Mr. MacNeur declared. “We will render a complete funeral service for nothing if the circumstances warrant it. The service is just the same at no charge as it is for a $1,000 funeral.” Mr. MacNeur produced a copy of the “Grant Miller Co-operative Plan,” in which this philosophy was spelled out.
If a family finds the First Standard Complete Funeral Arrangement including the finer type redwood casket at $495 to be beyond their present means or wishes, Grant Miller Mortuaries stand ready to reduce costs with the following co-operative plan chart, rather than use one or a series of cheap or inferior caskets.
There followed a descending price scale, culminating in “$0 for persons in Distress Circumstances.”
A recent inquiry as to the availability of the plan produced a puzzled response: “We have no such plan, never heard of it.” The redwood box, which many today would find attractive, is available now only as a “rental unit,” at $795 for one to two days’ occupancy. Today’s low-cost receptacle is a pine box, listed on the Grant Miller casket price list at $2,425, which brings the minimum cost of a Grant Miller funeral to $3,420.
Service Corporation International (see chapter 16 , “A Global Villageof the Dead”) has a “no-walk” policy and will do “whatever is necessary” to keep the family from going to a competitor, according to one disaffected employee. But trying to find out what kind of discount is offered and who might qualify is as difficult today as it was with Grant Miller thirty years ago. The rare customer who has the wit and gumption need only stand up and head for the door until the price has dropped to an acceptable level.
The guiding rule in funeral pricing appears to be “from each according to his means,” regardless of the actual wishes of the family. A funeral director in San Francisco says, “If a person drives a Cadillac, why should he have a Pontiac funeral?” The Cadillac symbol figures prominently in the mortician’s thinking. This kind of reasoning is peculiar to the funeral industry. A person can drive up to an expensive restaurant in a Cadillac and can order, rather than the $40 dinner, a $2 cup of tea and he will be served. It is unlikely that the proprietor will point to his elegant furnishings and staff and demand that the Cadillac owner order something more commensurate with his ability to pay so as to help defray the overhead of the restaurant.
There is, however, one major difference between the restaurant transaction and the funeral transaction. It is clear that while the Cadillac owner may return to the restaurant tomorrow with a party of six and order $40 dinners all around, this will not be true of
Not unnaturally, Mr. Rhoades felt that he had paid a fee of $50 a mile to have his friend’s body moved from the rest home to the crematorium. The undertaker no doubt felt, for his part, that he had furnished a service at well below his “break-even” point, or, in his own terminology, “below the cost at which we are fully compensated.” *
The point of view of the funeral director must here be explored. In 1962 I talked with Mr. Robert MacNeur, owner of a Grant Miller Mortuary, the largest funeral establishment in the Oakland area, with a volume of one thousand funerals a year. Their cheapest offering at the time was the standard service with redwood casket, at $485. “My firm has never knowingly subjected a person to financial hardship,” Mr. MacNeur declared. “We will render a complete funeral service for nothing if the circumstances warrant it. The service is just the same at no charge as it is for a $1,000 funeral.” Mr. MacNeur produced a copy of the “Grant Miller Co-operative Plan,” in which this philosophy was spelled out.
If a family finds the First Standard Complete Funeral Arrangement including the finer type redwood casket at $495 to be beyond their present means or wishes, Grant Miller Mortuaries stand ready to reduce costs with the following co-operative plan chart, rather than use one or a series of cheap or inferior caskets.
There followed a descending price scale, culminating in “$0 for persons in Distress Circumstances.”
A recent inquiry as to the availability of the plan produced a puzzled response: “We have no such plan, never heard of it.” The redwood box, which many today would find attractive, is available now only as a “rental unit,” at $795 for one to two days’ occupancy. Today’s low-cost receptacle is a pine box, listed on the Grant Miller casket price list at $2,425, which brings the minimum cost of a Grant Miller funeral to $3,420.
Service Corporation International (see chapter 16 , “A Global Villageof the Dead”) has a “no-walk” policy and will do “whatever is necessary” to keep the family from going to a competitor, according to one disaffected employee. But trying to find out what kind of discount is offered and who might qualify is as difficult today as it was with Grant Miller thirty years ago. The rare customer who has the wit and gumption need only stand up and head for the door until the price has dropped to an acceptable level.
The guiding rule in funeral pricing appears to be “from each according to his means,” regardless of the actual wishes of the family. A funeral director in San Francisco says, “If a person drives a Cadillac, why should he have a Pontiac funeral?” The Cadillac symbol figures prominently in the mortician’s thinking. This kind of reasoning is peculiar to the funeral industry. A person can drive up to an expensive restaurant in a Cadillac and can order, rather than the $40 dinner, a $2 cup of tea and he will be served. It is unlikely that the proprietor will point to his elegant furnishings and staff and demand that the Cadillac owner order something more commensurate with his ability to pay so as to help defray the overhead of the restaurant.
There is, however, one major difference between the restaurant transaction and the funeral transaction. It is clear that while the Cadillac owner may return to the restaurant tomorrow with a party of six and order $40 dinners all around, this will not be true of
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