I had to work with a funeral home this year and what I found was that private equity has taken over the funeral industry. Don’t assume that a funeral home that seems local actually is.
Read Jessica Mitford's "The American Way of Death"
> Feeling that death had become much too sentimentalized, highly commercialized, and, above all, excessively expensive, Mitford published her research, which, she argues, documents the ways in which funeral directors took advantage of the shock and grief of loved ones' friends and relatives to convince them to pay far more than necessary for the funeral and other related services, such as availability of so-called "grief counselors", a title she claimed was unmerited. The book became a major bestseller and led to Congressional hearings on the funeral industry.
“Men are the problem?” I ask. She nods: “They ruin everything.”
If you ever find yourself wondering why people who used to talk to you don't respond to your texts and calls anymore, ask if you're the kind of person to randomly spew hate.
If you really spend some time thinking about, the western "bury in the ground" funeral industry is morally sick and wrong. Spending many thousands of dollars to "embalm" a person and then thousands more on a big fancy wood casket. And high pressure sales tactics to upsell every part of the funeral services to the more expensive version of whatever it is.
Brief historical recap: The western cultural practice of chemical embalming originated before we had reliable 24x7 electricity and high-powered freezers and modern morgues. If there's some need to have a corpse around for a period of time until everyone can be gathered for a burial, we have the technology to do that without going through some weird pseudo-mummification chemical "embalming" process of hooking up a machine to pump chemicals into a corpse's veins and arteries.
edit: This is an ugly and uncomfortably thing to think about, but in my opinion, many "funeral home" service businesses are optimized to extract the absolute maximum amount of revenue by selling products/services to a grieving family with upsells at a time of their greatest psychological vulnerability and grief.
If you're going to bury people, there's a lot to be said for the traditional Islamic requirement (or equivalent) of basically, dig a 6 ft deep hole, wrap the person in a clean white sheet, and get them buried ASAP without going through all the rigmarole of embalming and fancy expensive casket.
You want to have a big elaborate memorial service? Ok sure great, whatever fits the needs of the family and friends. Spend the GDP of a small developing nation on it if you want to. But I truly don't see the point in trying to embalm/preserve/buy a fancy casket for a body that's intended to rot in the ground. Chemical preservation embalming and $8500 caskets are nonsensical.
I had to work with a funeral home this year and what I found was that private equity has taken over the funeral industry. Don’t assume that a funeral home that seems local actually is.
Read Jessica Mitford's "The American Way of Death"
> Feeling that death had become much too sentimentalized, highly commercialized, and, above all, excessively expensive, Mitford published her research, which, she argues, documents the ways in which funeral directors took advantage of the shock and grief of loved ones' friends and relatives to convince them to pay far more than necessary for the funeral and other related services, such as availability of so-called "grief counselors", a title she claimed was unmerited. The book became a major bestseller and led to Congressional hearings on the funeral industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Way_of_Death
“Men are the problem?” I ask. She nods: “They ruin everything.”
If you ever find yourself wondering why people who used to talk to you don't respond to your texts and calls anymore, ask if you're the kind of person to randomly spew hate.
If you really spend some time thinking about, the western "bury in the ground" funeral industry is morally sick and wrong. Spending many thousands of dollars to "embalm" a person and then thousands more on a big fancy wood casket. And high pressure sales tactics to upsell every part of the funeral services to the more expensive version of whatever it is.
Brief historical recap: The western cultural practice of chemical embalming originated before we had reliable 24x7 electricity and high-powered freezers and modern morgues. If there's some need to have a corpse around for a period of time until everyone can be gathered for a burial, we have the technology to do that without going through some weird pseudo-mummification chemical "embalming" process of hooking up a machine to pump chemicals into a corpse's veins and arteries.
edit: This is an ugly and uncomfortably thing to think about, but in my opinion, many "funeral home" service businesses are optimized to extract the absolute maximum amount of revenue by selling products/services to a grieving family with upsells at a time of their greatest psychological vulnerability and grief.
If you're going to bury people, there's a lot to be said for the traditional Islamic requirement (or equivalent) of basically, dig a 6 ft deep hole, wrap the person in a clean white sheet, and get them buried ASAP without going through all the rigmarole of embalming and fancy expensive casket.
You want to have a big elaborate memorial service? Ok sure great, whatever fits the needs of the family and friends. Spend the GDP of a small developing nation on it if you want to. But I truly don't see the point in trying to embalm/preserve/buy a fancy casket for a body that's intended to rot in the ground. Chemical preservation embalming and $8500 caskets are nonsensical.