Still, it’s a sign of the times. The funeral business, once long on solemnity and short on innovation, is changing. Families, less tied to convention and determined to save money, now welcome even demand-more options. And funeral directors are obliging with new ways to say goodbye. When Gay Gallaway buried her husband, Elmer, earlier this year, she didn’t want an impersonal, formal service. So Stephen C. Hammond, manager of the DeMoss-Durdan Garden Chapel in CorvalIis, Ore., brought together an informal gathering of friends, a nondenominational minister-and a hubcap, instead of flowers-in tribute to Elmer’s locally renowned collection. “It was about as nice a service as I’d ever been to,” Gay recalls. “People weren’t sad afterwards.”
Other companies are challenging what once was a packaging monopoly: in Memphis, Tenn., the Family Heritage Casket Gallery sells caskets to the public a la carte. A big favorite: the golfer’s special, lined in green velvet with a small flag under the lid marking-what else-the 18th hole. A touch like that would once have been heresy. Tradition, heavily promoted by morticians, dictated a lavishly proper send-off. In her 1960s expose “The American Way of Death,” Jessica Mitford described how the industry made a killing by promoting “Gracious Dying”-right down to the Perfect-Posture casket mattress. Her book helped prompt new industry regulation.
Yet economics, along with political pressure, is a big incentive to change. Competition in the once courtly profession has forced some of the new tactics. Shifting customer fashions have forced others: embalming is out, cremation is in. Between 1980 and 1991, say industry sources, cremations jumped from 9.7 to 18.5 percent of all services. For the mortician, whose biggest profits are in embalming, caskets and burial, the message is clear: adapt or die. Fred Hunter in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., has seen sales jump since he opened The Cremation Memorial Center in a glasswrapped former bank building. Without the overhead of embalming room and limos, Hunter can charge an average of $1,200, compared with $3,500 for a traditional funeral. In Skokie, Ill., Lloyd Mandel Funeral Direction has gone further. Mandel simply coordinates funerals, either at graveside or in a place of worship, working out of a storefront in a strip mall–across from a Dunkin’ Donuts. Whether they innovate or go the traditional route, the $8 billion funeral industry “still manages to make enormous profits,” says Mitford. This is a market, after all, that will never be short of customers.
