Death care means big business in today’s economy. It may seem strange, but it’s nevertheless true. Even though the business pages of large newspapers do not usually mention the death care, and though it is almost always ignored on the top business newscasts each day, death care in the United States is as profitable an industry as can be found. Plenty of public investors in companies like Houston-based giant SCI (Service Corp International) or (also Houston-based) Carriage Services Inc., Hilledbrand Inc. , Matthews International or others can testify that the industry is about as secure and stable as the stock market offers. In fact, some people have called death care an “eternal juggernaut” of the business world. It seems as of nothing can stop the growth and dependable stability of this industry that provides funeral, burial and cremation services to people across the country. As one expert recently commented in an online posting: everyone can be expected to die and, in today’s world, everyone who dies gets a funeral, burial or cremation – even if he can’t afford it (because state and local governments typically have funds to pay for the disposition of the bodies of the indigent). So, from a financial perspective, death care is typically a great place to stash away one’s money. Because the industry does not often get the attention that it deserves, we offer this general run down of the business and the goods and services it provides.
Definition of Death Care
One of the most surprising things many who learn about death care quickly discover is that it is an amazingly diverse industry, comprising small companies, large companies, traditional brick-and-mortar companies, and internet-only companies. And all of these companies offer large varieties and combinations of services, about the only thing they often have in common is that they produce or sell goods and services that are somehow related to death.
Death care involves funerals, burials, cremations, caskets, headstones, cemeteries, and cremation urns. But that’s just the start. It also, increasingly, involves consultants who are in the business of helping families navigate their various choices and finding the best memorial products and services for the best prices. (These people have been compared to the apartment complex trade in which professionals work on behalf of people moving to one town from another to find the best deal in apartment houses for the best price. These people are not on the payroll of any particular complex but, rather, take commissions from complexes to which they refer tenants. Many individuals and groups provide a similar service for when it comes to organizing the final arrangements of someone in a family.)
In general, the term death care encompasses any group or individual that assists, in any way, a family that has suffered the loss of a loved one. The assistance can be in the form of transportation of a body, arranging an autopsy (the medical examiner who performs the autopsy is not generally considered a part of the death care industry, though, increasingly, that is debated among insiders in the business. A few funeral homes have begun employing doctors on their own for their customers whose loved one do not qualify for free or low cost autopsies at the expense of the government. This practice is debated on ethical terms and is questioned by critics on the grounds that funeral homes may be selling autopsy services to people who do not need them in any sense of an imagination), writing an obituary, or even just consoling a grieving spouse. In most cases these services are offered for a fee, but, in many cases, the services are provided for free by non-profit organizations such as churches or civic clubs or even just family and friends of the deceased. In some funeral service and death care trade magazines, these people and groups are included in the overall definition of the term death care.
As with any definition in any realm of language, precisely narrowing the term death care to a meaning that all with an interest can accept, but, in general, if a business or profession provides services to those who have lost a family member, he or she is generally considered to be a part of the death care industry.
Death Care Companies
Despite its diversity, death care in the United States is dominated by the large, for-profit companies that are listed publicly on Wall Street Stock Exchanges. Perhaps the most influential of these is known simply as SCI (which stands for Service Corp International, but several newspaper reports have mentioned that even many employees of SCI cannot accurately say what SCI stands for), a quietly growing, mammoth operation based in what many have called “death city,” Houston, Texas, the place where the industry has centered itself, more or less by accident, in the same way that Los Angeles is considered a “home” for movies, Nashville for music, Pittsburgh for steel, and Milwaukee for beer. We say SCI is influential because it’s very presence has been credited for bringing so many other, smaller death care companies to Houston since about 1990. To be sure, some of these smaller companies are contractor firms that SCI hires for outsourced duties such as marketing, public relations and even cemetery management. But still others are in direct competition with SCI – perhaps quietly hoping to attract the attention of the larger firm in hopes of negotiating a profitable merger or sale. Whatever the case, it is widely acknowledged that, though other large death care firms do have headquarters and offices in many other cities across the United States (from Minneapolis to Las Vegas to plenty of other points), Houston, Texas is where the main business action for the industry can be expected to happen on any given day.
SCI can be said to specialize in running funeral homes, but it also is a significant player in almost all other aspects of death care as well. In locales where it is legal for one company to own both a cemetery and funeral home, SCI’s local operations typically do both, providing comprehensive funeral homes and cemeteries services. In the few remaining states that require cemeteries to be run independently from funeral homes, SCI tends to stick to its specialty of funeral homes. An interesting side note that makes SCI such an attractive investment for those in the financial services industry: SCI does not necessarily specialize in cremation, but its great number of funeral homes whose customers choose cremation for their loved ones makes it automatically a leader in the cremation division of the industry. By setting up regional cremation facilities that serve the company’s funeral homes across large areas, SCI has been able to turn cremation – which had once been deemed as a potentially deadly threat to funeral homes – into a highly profitable boon for its corporate bottom line. When expenses are shared across an entire nation of funeral homes and crematory competition is kept to a minimum, SCI has discovered that, though an individual cremation service may bring in far less money to the company than a funeral service (which almost always includes a burial service too), cremation can be as profitable, or maybe even more profitable, than the other divisions of the company. This is the sort of thing that industry experts and reporters who follow death care for various publications mean when they call SCI an influential company in the business. Because of its constant success at growing larger, more profitable with each year, SCI draws attention from all the others in the field without necessarily having to be outspoken politically. (You will rarely see an SCI representative speaking publicly on an issue, even if reporters call to inquire about a particular topic. Other companies, meanwhile, are eager to accept any opportunity to have their corporate opinions aired in public.)
Free or Low Cost Death Care
Though death care is generally thought of as the services provided by the large companies such as SCI and its competitors or affiliates, there are a growing number of death care options available, usually via the non-profit or government sectors, for free or very low cost. Chief among these may be the various “home funeral” services provided by organizations that have been established as a form of protest against what their members believe is an unethical profiteering off a family’s grief. These companies – often operating under the financial umbrella of a church – typically provide a great deal of advice, and even direct services, to those who wish to avoid hiring a funeral home all together as they plan and implement the memorial services of their friends and family. As these groups will often explain to their clients, it is typically entirely legal for people in the United States to hold funerals that are in keeping with real traditions in the country, rather than the expensive, elaborate traditions that have developed more or less artificially as a result of funeral directors’ attempts to sell more and more of their products and services to naïve, vulnerable grieving customers. Traditional funerals, it turns out, are very simple affairs, often conducted on a kitchen table with a burial in a family’s back yard in a simple, small, hand made wood coffin. The companies that provide support and advice on holding such simple memorial ceremonies typically are staffed by volunteers and accept only the very limited amount of donations that come from the benevolence of people who support their cause, offering valuable guidance for planning a memorial service. And, thus, they do not get much attention from news media and such, especially those who are interested in the profit-making potential of the larger death care companies such as SCI. But, nevertheless, they are a growing force in death care, thanks largely to the advent of the Internet. And, as one might expect, they face plenty of quiet – or even silent, opposition from those they threaten – usually without any ill intent or malice. A big part of the expense that these companies and groups find themselves facing is related to political fights imposed upon those whose long-held livelihoods they threaten. Companies such as SCI – and even the much smaller or companies that consider themselves competitors of SCI – have a wealth of money at their disposal to hire lawyers and lobbyists to keep their industry strong. Many state and local laws, for example, make it very difficult these days to bury a deceased relative’s body legally on a private estate – even in very remote and rural areas. And non-profit groups devoted to promoting and assisting home funerals will likely be inclined to argue against such legislation. But convincing lawmakers to do away with such rules in an effort to help those families who do not want to hire a funeral director is an expensive, complicated endeavor. More expensive and complicated than some might assume. Even the smallest of non-profit agencies can see legal and lobbying fees stack up into the millions of dollars range each year. And raising the money for such projects requires, often, nearly all of the resources that many of these companies have. It is often amazingly frustrating to proponents of these small death care operations that there is little time and money left over each year – after fighting the legal encroachments of the big, corporate players in the death care industry – to serve individual clients as well as they should be served. Hence, many who need death care advice and services find themselves on their own, forced to either generate huge sums to pay for services as they are provided by the large corporations in the industry such as SCI – or to simply do without.
Though stock market experts and those who follow the most important economic trends of any given day will likely say that death care is a Great American success story that has been playing a significant role in the much heralded stability of the economy of the United States, it is also true that there are plenty of prayers each days that death care in America can one day return to its simple, inexpensive – maybe even unprofitable – roots.