• "I suppose you could find something at a Payless Drugstore," seems like an innocuous remark, until you consider the context. This is what two widows at two separate Oregon funeral homes owned by Service Corporation International (SCI) were told when they objected to having to purchase a temporary urn for the ashes of their husbands. Each widow saw no reason to pay $45 for a cardboard box stamped "Temporary Container" on all four sides.
• In Pennsylvania and in Florida, families doing business with funeral homes owned by Stewart were told they had to buy vaults to store urns with cremated remains ($495) because this was required by the EPA as a health measure.
• Funeral homes owned by Loewen pass out price lists claiming that embalming, in addition to providing temporary preservation of the body, "eliminates health hazards," contrary to the facts stated by the Center for Disease Control.

From FAMSA to 60 Minutes and Harper's, everybody's dumping on the funeral industry. Since Jessica Mitford exposed the rapacious tactics of undertakers preying on survivors in her 1963 book The American Way of Death, the deathcare industry has faced more and more scrutiny. Occasionally the Federal Trade Commission swoops down, complaints get a hearing, and states adjust their laws to give consumers of this essential service some protection. Meanwhile the abuses continue: more egregious than the punchlines driven home by the drummer of a comedy club, more ridiculous than what anyone wants to believe. "The sad thing is, very little has changed," says Lisa Carlson, executive director of FAMSA and a contributor to an updated version of The American Way of Death, to be released by Knopf later this year.

Everybody Dies but Almost Nobody Does Anything About It
What's missing or downplayed in most stories about the terrors of the funeral industry is a bit of information that renders the terrors obsolete: you don't have to take it; by paying $10 to join a memorial society, you can not only save your family hundreds of dollars in funeral costs, but also spare them the indignity of haggling with greedy funeral directors. FAMSA is a group of over 150 memorial societies in the U.S. and Canada, representing about half a million members. Generally these are volunteer-run operations that act as a combination buyer's club and consumer protection service. In areas where any sort of consumer activism raises the hackles of blue-blooded capitalists, memorial societies are scarce; in other areas the staff can hardly keep up with requests for information, let alone track down complaints.

In Seattle, however, there's People's Memorial Association (PMA), the original memorial society and your best ally in the fight against the parasites who feed off the relatives of the dead. The Reverend Fred Shorter started PMA in 1939, to help mourners find a more spiritually meaningful way to cope with death. He advocated immediate cremation and a memorial service as alternatives to the gaudy, materialistic display of what had become a "traditional" funeral.

Release the Balloons
The tradition of spending an average of $4600 (see "At Your Disposal" by Judith Newman, Harper's, November, 1997) to embalm, view, and bury somebody (not including a few thousand in cemetery costs) owes more to the American free enterprise system than to what was practiced a hundred years ago in the U.S. or currently in Europe. The FAMSA web site has excerpts from an SCI training manual advising morticians how to treat people who come in wanting a simple cremation. "Inform the family of the variety of available service options . . . offer meaningful services by including balloon releases and refreshments-catering. Offer family flowers to accompany the remains through the cremation process," are some topics the Funeral Director should raise in the first telephone conversation with the bereaved. Come in for a twenty minute conference and you might stay for hours, with the Funeral Director and the Family Service Counselor teaming up to present the gamut of goods and services available for purchase.

PMA members can avoid all that. They can opt for a full-service funeral; mostly they don't. Whatever they choose, they pay about half as much as others do: $530, rather than $1100 for cremation (the West coast has a high cremation rate of 60 percent-and in Seattle the rate is much higher, says Gary Webster of Bleitz Funeral Home). A steady increase over the last ten years of about 7,000 newcomers a year puts the current membership at 88,000. Unlike smaller societies, they have some paid staff. This helps them conduct regular follow-up surveys. 35 families a month receive questionnaires asking them to evaluate the service they received. Almost all respond and, almost all responses have been positive.

Much of the credit for this record goes to Bleitz Funeral Home and, by extension, to their parent company SCI. For nearly all of its history, Bleitz has been PMA's funeral contractor, honoring an arrangement first agreed to by James C. Bleitz, who acknowledged his competitors might object to this sort of pact but said, "We believe that we are here to provide people with what they want."

One Big Happy Family
"There are all kinds of people," says Jim Letsen, director of SCI in the Seattle area. "PMA has grown and grown and grown. It's been a mutually beneficial relationship."

SCI bought Bleitz a few years ago. From 1995 to 1996 their assets increased by about 47 percent, reaching $1.6 billion in operating capital. In a trend reminiscent of the healthcare industry, deathcare is being taken over by conglomerates. SCI is the largest, followed by Loewen and Stewart. In Washington more than half of the funeral homes are corporate-owned (four times more than the national average, as of 1995). Gary Webster of Bleitz points out how being part of a larger organization helps consumers-PMA members among them-by offering access to funeral homes outside of the immediate Seattle area, as well as to cemeteries.

To date, however, consolidation in the deathcare industry has presided over a rise in prices, and Lisa Carlson refers to tie-ins between funeral homes and cemeteries as the "under-reported scandal" in the deathcare industry, as cemetery costs offer greater profits than simple cremation yields. In 1992 the Seattle Times reported a basic cremation cost $865 ($447 for PMA members). While the cost for those unaffiliated with PMA has risen 27 percent since then, the PMA cost went up 17 percent. Every two years Peoples, Webster of Bleitz, and Letsen of SCI work out a new contract. It's been mostly a simple renewal, with the PMA rate tied to the Consumer Price Index of 3 percent per year. "If you hold true to that year in, year out, you're going to wind up behind," says Webster.

So why do they do it? Assuming the whopping casket mark-ups quoted by industry critics are exaggerated and the decline of the profit rate (12.24 to 8.65 percent) quoted by industry sources is true, how can they afford to give away their services at half price? Measuring the death rate against the amount of deaths a mortuary can handle in a year, the FAMSA web page reports that the number of funeral homes that we have outnumbers the number we really need by about 3 to 1 (Washington: 195 to 165). The bottom line is, it's a high-profit enterprise, capable of withstanding all sorts of inefficiencies. There's plenty of room to cater to a market niche as large-and as small-as that represented by a memorial society. A typical funeral home handles 300 deaths a year. Bleitz, with a branch in Seattle and one in Bellevue, does 3100, 70 percent of which come from PMA. SCI, from its Houston worldwide headquarters, approached FAMSA with an offer to be their sole provider; FAMSA turned them down.

Pay Now, Go Later
So, what are you waiting for? Inevitably, people procrastinate, especially when the subject is death. While many funeral homes benefit from the distraught families who're driven to them at the last moment, the industry counsels planning ahead. Of course, the ideal deathcare plan from their perspective involves a hefty prepayment, half of which (in Washington) need not be put in a trust account by the funeral home.

By setting arrangements in advance, in writing, through a memorial society, you can save your family a tremendous amount of trouble. To counteract a natural tendency the elderly have to avoid dealing with death, PMA lets you register other people, such as your parents. The one-time registration fee of $10 must be paid in advance, and membership in one memorial society is transferable to all of them.

"Ultimately, you're going to have to sit down with the Funeral Director and make arrangements," says SCI's Letsen.

Ultimately, you're going to die. And somebody you love is going to get stuck with the bill.

To reach Peoples Memorial Association, call 206-325-0489 or write to them at 2366 Eastlake Ave. E., Seattle, WA 98102.

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Contents this page were published in the March/April, 1998 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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