In funeral homes, customers are speaking up

After Helen Fitzgerald’s first husband died, she had the presence of mind to ask his boss, a family friend, to accompany her to the funeral home for emotional support. Little did she know she’d be getting a strong financial advocate, too.

“I was looking at the solid cherry casket, and he went over to opt for this metal one, which was $5,000 cheaper,” says Fitzgerald, who lives in Fairfax, Va., and is the author of “The Grieving Child,” “The Mourning Handbook” and “The Grieving Teen.” “Every time the funeral director asked if I wanted something added to the service, my friend would say, ‘How much is that going to cost?’ In essence, he gave me permission to spend less money.”

Although this happened in 1974 — Fitzgerald is now training director for the American Hospice Foundation in Washington and is certified in thanatology, the study of death and dying — the story has a contemporary ring.

Although the funeral industry is a service one, it also engages — some would say aggressively — in sales, and at a most vulnerable time in clients’ lives. But consumers have become increasingly aware of their rights and begun to take more control over funereal matters.

In the forefront of educating the public is the Funeral Consumers Alliance in South Burlington, Vt., a nonprofit organization founded in 1963. Along with monitoring industry trends and mediating complaints, the organization spends much of its effort alerting consumers to the existence what is known as the Funeral Rule, issued in 1984 by the Federal Trade Commission.

This rule requires funeral directors to itemize the costs of services like pick-up of the body, embalming, make-up, casket, flowers, viewing, the service at the funeral parlor or church, the hearse and the grave-site ceremony. But noncompliance is rampant and widespread, says the alliance’s executive director, Joshua Slocum.

“It’s a huge problem,” says Slocum, who prices a typical funeral in this country — excluding cemetery costs — at about $6,500. “This noncompliance costs consumers millions of dollars and, even more importantly, manipulates them and denies them the choices the law is supposed to guarantee them. In any single metropolitan area in any state, if you give me a stack of price lists from funeral homes, about 75 percent of those general price lists have one or more Funeral Rule violations.”

What’s worse, he says, most people don’t even know the Funeral Rule exists.

Thus many consumers, in addition to not knowing they are entitled to an itemized price list, are unaware they have the right to opt for, say, immediate burial or cremation without a ceremony, to refuse embalming or even to provide their own caskets.

“Our organization is committed to 100 percent compliance with the Funeral Rule,” says Robert Biggins, president of the National Funeral Directors Association and owner of Magoun-Biggins Funeral Home, in Rockland, Mass. “If someone commits a change that is designed to mislead a customer, that is grievous, and that type of thing should absolutely be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Yet Slocum believes the FTC "has been completely derelict” in enforcing the Funeral Rule, and some funeral directors tend to agree.

“Some of these funeral directors know the Funeral Rule has no teeth,” says Cary Troxel, a funeral director who owns Funeral Solutions, a full-service funeral home in Coco, Fla., who has become something of consumer advocate himself.

Stephen Cohen, an attorney with the FTC, says, “We haven’t necessarily seen something that cries out for attention that the Funeral Rule isn’t working."

Traditionally, in the funeral business, caskets are marked up as much as fivefold, Troxel says.

“Funeral homes realizing this obscene profit on caskets is not appropriate today, when people can go to a casket store or a provider that’s selling them for less," he said.

Troxel also owns casketsonline.com, which sells bronze, copper, steel, stainless steel and hardwood caskets at about half the price one might pay at a funeral parlor. Two of his best-selling items are made of 20-gauge steel and priced at $1,200 and $1,300. “I tell customers they have a right to seek value in their funeral merchandise,” he says.

Troxel notes the home page of his online business that funeral homes "must accept the casket you have provided without duress or embarrassment to the consumer." Yet he finds many homes still put up a fight.

He describes one panicked buyer who tried to cancel an order after the funeral home told the consumer the coffin he had ordered would be “full of mice and roaches.” Another customer, he added, suspiciously interrogated him for selling a coffin for so much less than the funeral home would. Like Troxel, other funeral directors are turning the interests of price-conscious consumers into opportunities.

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