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.
I have a friend whose family owned a funeral home, but due to unfortunate circumstances were forced to sell it. Now it belongs to an investment company who threw out any sense of respect and slathered it in gaudy baby-blue paint and a sans-serif logo, still keeping the old family name of course. I grimace every time I drive by.
And where it isn't PE actually buying up local plumbing, heating, HVAC companies, it's "CRM lead generators" using automation tools to build plausible looking websites/phone number presences that look like a real company, fooling people who are searching for plumbing services in $city into calling them, then funnelling the lead to some local company in exchange for a percentage. Worst offender in this category is probably locksmiths.
Not many things are actually inevitable. We could provide smaller companies some regulatory/tax advantages compared to larger ones, making them more competitive. If that's what society values, it can easily be done.
Yes, you're both right. An important role of government is to use regulation to prevent the inevitable.
Long ago it was understood that monopolies are bad for us, but it looks like we're destined to learn these lessons again the hard way. I don't think it was ever imagined the people would vote monopolists into the position of regulator.
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.
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.
A friend of mine was pretty big on minimizing impact on the environment. We got this surreal funeral: a thousand people were invited, flew in from all over the world. Lavish digs rented at insane expense, lots of food, a gift bag and so on. And then when they brought in the deceased it got a bit weirder still because they had just rolled the body in a linen sheet. So many conflicting memories about that. He was a great guy by the way.
My mum died this year so I have recent experience with this. It does seem, like so many things, to profit from the weak. But they do, of course, provide a valuable service. I didn't really fancy chucking my mum's body into my hatchback and going down the tip.
I didn't feel like they pushed hard at all to upsell anything, it wasn't like a car dealer, but the options were definitely available. We chose the cheapest possible coffin because what a ridiculous waste of resources otherwise. Literally nobody was going to scrutinise it and then it was going to get burnt. I noticed the catalogue had quite a few more pages in it, though.
Interestingly my dad, newly widowed, was much more sceptical of the whole thing than me. He found the language they used quite disagreeable. They would refer to the body as "her" and say things like they are "looking after her" etc. She had lost almost half her bodyweight before death so it is kinda weird that this half matters so much. To us, of course, she had already left. We looked after her, they were just moving a body around.
But you have to think, a lot of people will pay a lot more to buy into this illusion and perhaps soften the blow of the death. I feel like you have to confront it one way or another so just get it over and done with. I just imagine the souls of the departed watching from a higher plane of existence puzzled about why we care so much about their former bodies.
You may be getting downvoted because this is a bit of a rant, but I agree with you. Chemical embalming and sealed caskets aren't for the dead, they're for the living who don't want to think of their loved one decomposing in the ground. Funeral homes sell the illusion that they can somehow prevent that. Unfortunately, what happens to an embalmed body is equally gruesome, just slower and with added poison. Personally I'd rather let the worms recycle me into a nice shrub or something.
I think a lot of people don't want to visualize that either, hence open casket funerals. They want the illusion that the person is forever "just resting". Understandable, but unfortunately 100% fantasy.
One of the things you will learn after spending some time in the poorest parts of the developing world where the local cultural/religious practices don't do cremation, is that in many places, there is no equivalent of a "funeral home" or professional services for such. Each family is responsible for preparing the body of their relative and arranging for the burial themselves. It's a very visceral, in your face, hands on experience that people can't and won't do in western "developed" countries. Thus the standard practice of basically, doing quick prep on the deceased, getting them into a white cotton sheet (or local cultural equivalent) and buried quickly.
“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.
Reading the passage, I was surprised that she attributed greed specifically to men. There’s a number of male coded sins out there (wrath, lust) but greed has always seemed like a pretty universal affliction.
No way mom's not been out for their own kids all these centuries; not that there's anything wrong with that but they exist and it's just emotional propaganda social moat stuff to compare/contrast rhetoric with effort, not ignore the eyes for rhetoric
Like it seems feminism so far hasn't really resulted in anything new from the woman's context; they all just got into lawyer, judge, accountant, plumber, engineer, mechanic jobs too.
Celebrating the whole cultural history of how women just signed right up for the violence is not a flex
if you ever find yourself creating a new profile just to make a comment like you just did, ask if you're the kind of person who is afraid to acknowledge their own thoughts publicly
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.
I have a friend whose family owned a funeral home, but due to unfortunate circumstances were forced to sell it. Now it belongs to an investment company who threw out any sense of respect and slathered it in gaudy baby-blue paint and a sans-serif logo, still keeping the old family name of course. I grimace every time I drive by.
PE has also done this with locally branded veterinarians.
And plumbers, pest control, heating, HVAC, ....
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-16/private-e... (https://wallhop.io/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2...)
And where it isn't PE actually buying up local plumbing, heating, HVAC companies, it's "CRM lead generators" using automation tools to build plausible looking websites/phone number presences that look like a real company, fooling people who are searching for plumbing services in $city into calling them, then funnelling the lead to some local company in exchange for a percentage. Worst offender in this category is probably locksmiths.
And everything else. Centralization, monopolization, more and more without an end to it. An inevitable outcome of capitalism.
> An inevitable outcome of capitalism.
Not many things are actually inevitable. We could provide smaller companies some regulatory/tax advantages compared to larger ones, making them more competitive. If that's what society values, it can easily be done.
Yes, you're both right. An important role of government is to use regulation to prevent the inevitable.
Long ago it was understood that monopolies are bad for us, but it looks like we're destined to learn these lessons again the hard way. I don't think it was ever imagined the people would vote monopolists into the position of regulator.
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
This book is mentioned a lot early in the article, and its effects on people's perception of the industry are discussed.
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.
A friend of mine was pretty big on minimizing impact on the environment. We got this surreal funeral: a thousand people were invited, flew in from all over the world. Lavish digs rented at insane expense, lots of food, a gift bag and so on. And then when they brought in the deceased it got a bit weirder still because they had just rolled the body in a linen sheet. So many conflicting memories about that. He was a great guy by the way.
My mum died this year so I have recent experience with this. It does seem, like so many things, to profit from the weak. But they do, of course, provide a valuable service. I didn't really fancy chucking my mum's body into my hatchback and going down the tip.
I didn't feel like they pushed hard at all to upsell anything, it wasn't like a car dealer, but the options were definitely available. We chose the cheapest possible coffin because what a ridiculous waste of resources otherwise. Literally nobody was going to scrutinise it and then it was going to get burnt. I noticed the catalogue had quite a few more pages in it, though.
Interestingly my dad, newly widowed, was much more sceptical of the whole thing than me. He found the language they used quite disagreeable. They would refer to the body as "her" and say things like they are "looking after her" etc. She had lost almost half her bodyweight before death so it is kinda weird that this half matters so much. To us, of course, she had already left. We looked after her, they were just moving a body around.
But you have to think, a lot of people will pay a lot more to buy into this illusion and perhaps soften the blow of the death. I feel like you have to confront it one way or another so just get it over and done with. I just imagine the souls of the departed watching from a higher plane of existence puzzled about why we care so much about their former bodies.
My understanding is that embalming is mainly an American thing, not a Western one. Caskets are also a lot cheaper around here (Austria).
You may be getting downvoted because this is a bit of a rant, but I agree with you. Chemical embalming and sealed caskets aren't for the dead, they're for the living who don't want to think of their loved one decomposing in the ground. Funeral homes sell the illusion that they can somehow prevent that. Unfortunately, what happens to an embalmed body is equally gruesome, just slower and with added poison. Personally I'd rather let the worms recycle me into a nice shrub or something.
The solution for not decomposing is called cremation.
I would think people who find it hard to accept their loved one’s body decomposing would not like the idea of it burning to ashes either.
I think a lot of people don't want to visualize that either, hence open casket funerals. They want the illusion that the person is forever "just resting". Understandable, but unfortunately 100% fantasy.
One of the things you will learn after spending some time in the poorest parts of the developing world where the local cultural/religious practices don't do cremation, is that in many places, there is no equivalent of a "funeral home" or professional services for such. Each family is responsible for preparing the body of their relative and arranging for the burial themselves. It's a very visceral, in your face, hands on experience that people can't and won't do in western "developed" countries. Thus the standard practice of basically, doing quick prep on the deceased, getting them into a white cotton sheet (or local cultural equivalent) and buried quickly.
The real cost now is the required “vault.”
It's not required. Nor is a casket.
You can be buried in a cardboard box. But the funeral director will be sure to remind your survivors that it's not waterproof.
“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.
Reading the passage, I was surprised that she attributed greed specifically to men. There’s a number of male coded sins out there (wrath, lust) but greed has always seemed like a pretty universal affliction.
> There’s a number of male coded sins out there (wrath, lust) but greed has always seemed like a pretty universal affliction.
Isn't it usually associated with the business sphere rather than the personal sphere?
I don't think equal labor force participation has been a thing for that meant decades.
No way mom's not been out for their own kids all these centuries; not that there's anything wrong with that but they exist and it's just emotional propaganda social moat stuff to compare/contrast rhetoric with effort, not ignore the eyes for rhetoric
Like it seems feminism so far hasn't really resulted in anything new from the woman's context; they all just got into lawyer, judge, accountant, plumber, engineer, mechanic jobs too.
Celebrating the whole cultural history of how women just signed right up for the violence is not a flex
The PE firms that have taken over much of the funeral industry are run by almost exclusively old white guys in suits.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=private+e...
if you ever find yourself creating a new profile just to make a comment like you just did, ask if you're the kind of person who is afraid to acknowledge their own thoughts publicly
I don't need every comment of mine coming back to me because of someone's personal crusade.
Amen to that.