Funeral Industry, Unethical Practices

Family members are particularly vulnerable at the time of the death of a loved one to feelings of guilt and despair. This vulnerability can lead to magnifying the processes of rites and rituals involved in funerary practices. Individuals who are involved in the for-profit funeral industry know these psychological phenomena and find it easy to exploit the vulnerable in order to profit handsomely from providing funerary services.

Widespread ethical problems in the funeral industry were first highlighted by the 1963 muckraking exposé, The American Way of Death, written by Jessica Mitford with her husband, Robert Treuhaft. Mitford's book exposed a range of practices seemingly designed to maximize the cost of funerals. They ranged from outright deceptions, such as telling consumers that embalming was a legal requirement, to providing underwear and universal “fitafut” shoes, even when only the upper part of the corpse was to be displayed in a split lid casket. Mitford's graphic description of embalming in particular enraged readers of the book, which quickly became a best seller.

The public outcry that followed its publication prompted the U.S. Congress to hold hearings on the funeral industry. Eventually the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued its Funeral Rule in 1984, which sought to end the secrecy surrounding funeral costs and the practice of forcing all consumers to pay for all services, whether wanted or not. The rule requires that consumers be given complete and itemized cost information for specific services to be provided.

Although the Funeral Rule led to more accurate and easily understood information, the funeral industry adopted marketing practices designed to represent the funeral home personnel as friendly and supportive of grieving families, appealing to a [Page 480]combination of guilt and gratitude to encourage decisions for more expensive options. The revised practices of a revived funeral industry prompted Mitford and Truhaft to write a second scathing indictment of the funeral industry. In The American Way of Death Revisited (published 2 years after Mitford's death in 1996), Mitford adopts a journalistic technique of accurate reporting with devastating effectiveness. Starting with the task of identifying, characterizing, and attracting the customer base, Mitford details everything from the analysis of the ability to pay by the bereaved, the choice of language in describing the services and products offered by funeral homes, the procedures employed in preparing the deceased for viewing, the range of caskets and their strategic array in showrooms and catalogs, to the final item: the vault and the techniques for its sale.

Characterizing the Customer

Funeral directors are acutely aware of the pending financial resources of families that are in the process of dealing with settling the estate of a recently deceased relative. Some of the resources are predictable from the decedent's history of employment. Minimally they include the death benefit from Social Security. Often there are paid-up insurance policies intended for “final expenses”; larger policies, pension benefits, and stock accounts may provide a considerable amount of cash to the immediate family. In a smaller community, the funeral home owner can calculate with great accuracy the available cash and can plan the funerary services to be offered accordingly.

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