Death Care Industry

Death Care Series

The American Way of Death Revisited by Jessica Mitford, 1996, Excerpts

Of all the changes in the funeral scene over the last decades, easily the most significant is the emergence of monopolies in what the trade is pleased to call the “death care” industry. Of the three publicly traded major players – Service Corporation International [SCI], the Loewen Group, and Stewart Enterprises – SCI, incorporated in 1984, is the undisputed giant.

[Note: The Alderwoods Group formed after the Loewen Group emerged from bankruptcy on January 2, 2002. In November 2006, Alderwoods was acquired by Service Corporation International in a US$1.2 billion deal]

The Big Three of the corporate funeral world have been pitted in a worldwide race to buy up cemeteries with integrated undertaking establishments. Of the twenty-two thousand funeral homes in the United States, the vast majority are small operations doing somewhere between fifty and one hundred funerals a year. SCI entered this picture with the force of a hurricane, swept away the antiquated methods of the old-timers, and substituted “clustering,” the latest in streamlined mass production. Borrowing from the successful techniques of McDonald’s, where food preparation and management functions are centralized, SCI first buys up a carefully chosen selection of funeral homes, cemeteries, flower shops, and crematoria in a given metropolitan area. The funeral customer is totally unaware of the strategy of clustering because of the immensely successful SCI policy of anonymity.

The next step is to move the essential elements of the trade to a central depot. “Clustered” in this hive of activity are the hearses, limousines, utility cars, drivers, dispatchers, embalmers, and a spectrum of office workers from accountants to data processors, who are kept constantly busy servicing, at vast savings, the needs of a half dozen or more erstwhile independent funeral homes. Needless to say, the savings obtained via the cluster approach are not passed on to the consumer. SCI prices have risen sharply, with a targeted increase of 30 percent. Prices of the Loewen Group mortuaries tend to parallel those of SCI.

Zoellick Comments on the Funeral Business

http://www.heritage.org

03 Jul 2001

In a June 2001 speech to the right-wing Heritage Foundation in Washington, Zoellick made the case that there is no alternative to globalization and that U.S. companies and consumers were already benefiting in countless ways from this new wave of corporate-led economic integration. To drive his point home, Zoellick noted: “Even the funeral business has gone global, with a Houston-based company now selling funeral plots in 20 countries.”

SERVICE CORPORATION INTERNATIONAL - SCI

2006 Form 10-Q

Over the long-term, we believe that our industry leadership, along with superior brand, reputation, financial strength and geographic reach, will result in expanded growth opportunities with the aging of the Baby Boom generation.

     

 2010 Annual Report

We believe we are well-positioned for long-term profitable growth. We are the largest company in the North American deathcare industry with unparalleled scale on both a national and local basis and are poised to benefit from the aging of America. We have demonstrated that we can generate significant and consistent cash flow, even in difficult economic times.

Worldwide, we have 1,417 funeral service locations and 381 cemeteries (including 218 funeral service/cemetery combination locations) covering 43 states, eight Canadian provinces, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Germany. Our funeral service and cemetery operations consist of funeral service locations, cemeteries, funeral service/cemetery combination locations, crematoria, and related businesses. We provide all professional services relating to funerals and cremations, including the use of funeral facilities and motor vehicles and preparation and embalming services. Funeral-related merchandise, including caskets, casket memorialization products, burial vaults, cremation receptacles, cremation memorial products, flowers, and other ancillary products and services, is sold at funeral service locations. Our cemeteries provide cemetery property interment rights, including mausoleum spaces, lots, and lawn crypts, and sell cemetery-related merchandise and services, including stone and bronze memorials, markers, merchandise installations, and burial openings and closings.

Purpose of Embalming

Death Care Series

The American Wayof Death Revisited by Jessica Mitford, 1996, Excerpts

The primary purpose of embalming, all funeral men will tell you, is that embalming is done for reasons of sanitation and required by law. The true purpose of embalming is to facilitate an open-casket funeral – with the emphasis on casket. Embalming is a procedure that boils down to sales and profits. “Embalming is the cornerstone upon which the funeral service profession was founded and it has remained so through the years,” editorializes the American Funeral Director.

One might suppose that the whole point of embalming is the long-term preservation of the deceased. Actually, although phrases like “peace-of-mind protection” and “eternal preservation” crop up frequently in casket and vault advertising, the embalmers themselves know better. The more dilute the embalming fluid, the softer and more natural appearing the guest of honor. Therefore, the usual procedure is to embalm with about enough preservation to ensure that the body will last through the funeral – generally, a matter of a few days.

Egyptian Origins of Embalming

Death Care Series

The American Way of Death Revisited by Jessica Mitford, 1996, Excerpts

Embalming is indeed a most extraordinary procedure, and one must wonder at the docility of Americans who each year pay hundreds of millions of dollars for its perpetuation, blissfully ignorant of what it is all about, what is done, and how it is done. Embalming and restorative art is so universally employed in the United States and Canada that for years the funeral director did it routinely, without consulting corpse or kin.

The practice of preserving dead bodies with chemicals, decorating them with paint and powder, and arranging them for a public showing has its origin in antiquity – but not in Judaeo-Christian antiquity. The Jews frowned upon embalming, as did the early Christians, who regarded it as a pagan custom. This incongruous behavior towards the human dead originated with the pagan Egyptians and reached its high point in the second millennium B.C. Thereafter, embalming suffered a decline from which it did not recover until it was made part of the standard funeral service in twentieth-century America.

The Egyptian method of embalming as described by Herodotus sounds like a rather crude exercise in human taxidermy. The entrails and brain were removed, the body scoured with palm wine and purified with spices. After being soaked for seventy days in a saline solution, the corpse was washed and wrapped in strips of fine linen, then placed in a “wooden case of human shape” which in turn was put in a sepulchral chamber. It was by no means so universally employed in ancient Egypt as it is today in the USA. The ordinary peasant was not embalmed.

King Tut

Modern America Funeral Customs

Death Care Series

The American Way of Death Revisited by Jessica Mitford, 1996, Excerpts

If the undertaker is the stage manager of the fabulous production that is the modern American funeral, the stellar role is reserved for the occupant of the open casket. The decor, the stagehands, the supporting cast are all arranged for the most advantageous display of the deceased, without which the rest of the paraphernalia would lose its fantastic array of costly merchandise and services is pyramided to dazzle the mourners and facilitate the plunder of the next of kin.

The uninitiated, entering a casket-selection room for the first time, may think he is looking at a random grouping of variously priced merchandise. Actually, endless thought and care are lavished on the development of new and better selection-room arrangements, for it has been found that the placing of the caskets materially affects the amount of the sale. The decor and lighting of the selection room and particularly the arrangement of merchandise are matters of greatest importance, for these materially condition and affect the conduct of the transaction itself. As an interior decorator writes, “Being the financial foundation of mortuary income, caution should be exercised in every detail and appointment, employing the finest selling qualities or floor lighting effects, proper placement of caskets and special background features; the psychological effect producing a feeling of security and confidence that results in the sale of higher grade caskets, and the return of families for additional service when needed.” Behind the scenes, waiting for their cue, are the cemeteries, florists, monument makers, vault manufacturers and the casket-making companies.

The funeral home “chapel” has begun to assume more and more importance as the focal point of the establishment. The chapel proper is a simulated place of worship. Because it has to be all things to all people, it is subject to a quick change by wheeling into place a “devotional chapel set” appropriate to the religion being catered to at the moment – a Star of David, a cross, a statue of the Virgin, and so on.

Inevitably, some thirtieth-century archaeologists will labor to reconstruct our present-day level of civilization from a study of our burial practices. They might rashly conclude that twentieth-century America was a nation of abjectly imitative conformists, devoted to machine-made gadgetry and mass-produced art of debased quality; that its dominant theology was a weird mixture of primitive superstitions and superficial attitudes towards death, overlaid with a distinct tendency towards necrophilism.

Colonial America Funeral Customs

Death Care Series

The American Way of Death Revisited by Jessica Mitford, 1996

The cemetery as a moneymaking proposition is new in this century. The earliest type of burial ground in America was the churchyard. This gave way in the nineteenth century to graveyards at the town limits, largely municipality owned and operated. Whether owned by church or municipality, the burial ground was considered a community facility; charges for graves were nominal, and the burial ground was generally not expected to show a profit.

From colonial days until the nineteenth century, the American funeral was almost exclusively a family affair, in the sense that the family and close friends performed most of the duties in connection with the dead body itself. Until the eighteenth century, few people except the very rich were buried in coffins. The “casket,” and particularly the metal casket, is a phenomenon of modern America, unknown in past days and in other parts of the world. Funeral flowers, today the major mourning symbol and a huge item of national expenditure, did not make their appearance in England or America until after the middle of the nineteenth century, and only then over the opposition of church leaders.

The major Western faiths have remarkably little to say about how funerals should be conducted. Such doctrinal statements as have been enunciated concerning disposal of the dead invariably stress simplicity, the equality of all men in death, emphasis on the spiritual rather than on the physical remains. The Roman Catholic Church requires that the following, simple instructions be observed: “[1] That the body be decently laid out; [2] that lights be placed beside the body; [3] that a cross be laid upon the breast, or failing that, the hands laid on the breast in the form of a cross; [4] that the body be sprinkled with holy water and incense at stated times; [5] that it be buried in consecrated ground.” The Jewish religion specifically prohibits display in connection with funerals: “It is strictly ordained that there must be no adornment of the plain wooden coffin used by the Jew, nor may flowers be placed inside or outside.  Plumes, velvet palls and the like are strictly prohibited, and all show and display of wealth discouraged; moreover, the synagogue holds itself responsible for the arrangements for burial, dispensing with the services of the “Dismal Trade.” In Israel today, unconfined burial is the rule, and the deceased is returned to the earth in a simple shroud.

Shroud

http://www.kinkaraco.com/

Fictional Billboard Burner – Monkey Wrench Gang

Billboard Series

The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, 1975, Excerpts

The Highway Patrol arrived promptly fifteen minutes late, radioing the report of an inexplicable billboard fire to a causally scornful dispatcher at headquarters, then ejecting self from vehicle, extinguisher in gloved hand, to ply the flames for a while with little limp gushes of liquid sodium hydrochloride to the pyre. Dehydrated by months, sometimes years of desert winds and thirsty desert air, the pine and paper of the noblest most magnificent of billboards yearned in every molecule for quick combustion, wrapped itself in fire with the mad lust, the rapt intensity, of lovers fecundating.

                       

Doc Sarvis by this time had descended the crumbly bank of the roadside under a billowing glare from his handiwork, dumped his gas can into trunk of car, slammed the lid and slumped down in the front seat beside his driver. “Next?” she [Abbzug] says.

Introduction to 2000 Edition by Douglas Brinkley

The Monkey Wrench Gang is far more than just a controversial book – it is revolutionary, anarchic, seditious, and, in the wrong hands, dangerous. Although Abbey claimed it was just a work of fiction written to “entertain and amuse,” the novel was swiftly embraced by eco-activists frustrated with the timid approaches of mainstream environmental groups like the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society.

Earth First! Rankled the public and even other environmentalists from the start. The group announced itself in 1981 by unfurling a hundred-yard-long black plastic streamer to look like a deep crack down the face of Glen Canyon Dam – a scene taken straight from the opening pages of The Monkey Wrench Gang.

Glen Canyon Earth First

Billboards Promoting a Public Opinion

Billboard Series

On the way to the Grand Canyon for a family vacation in summer of 2010, we passed through Kingman, Arizona on the old Route 66. Pictured is a billboard promoting the governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, “doing the job the feds won’t do” with the ‘o’ in ‘won’t’ depicting the Obama symbol. Using a popular WWII poster, a much younger Jan Brewer is pictured as Rosie the Riveter. “Doing the job the feds won’t do” is in reference to Arizona’s controversial immigration policy regarding the protection of its borders. Whether one agrees with Arizona’s immigration policy or not, Governor Jan Brewer's billboard demonstrates that billboards still play a key role in the promotion of a public opinion.