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Funerals 'R' Us | page 1, 2
Still, it has seemed to many funeral directors that the only choices were to sell hard or to sell out. SCI, along with Loewen (its recently bankrupt Canadian competition) and Stewart Enterprises from Louisiana, has been wildly successful at persuading funeral directors and their associations that the future belongs to them. The bottom-line sensibilities that turn every sadness into a sales op have convinced a portion of the public that funerals and funeral directors are more trouble than they are worth, and a little like cheeseburgers: all the same. We are not. The name on my sign, like the names on most, is not Funerals 'R' Us or Best Buy Burials or Mortuary Express. The name is mine, my family's, my father's and mother's, my brother's and sister's, our son's and daughter's. When we serve the families in our town well, they can ignore us, personally. When we don't, they can complain, personally. It is better consumer protection than the FTC or CNN or anyone in Houston can provide. People talk. Our lives and livelihoods depend on it. The name is worth more than the brick and mortar, the rolling stock or any money in the bank. It is the only one we have. We cannot get another. It determines whom we hire, what we sell, for how much, what we say, who we are and what we do. Home office is here -- where the buck stops, where the phone rings in the middle of the night. And because, like a mother and a father and the love of one's life, a funeral is a thing we only get one of, funerals do not respond well to efficiencies, conveniences, downsizings, economies of scale or uniformities -- all much valued in the corporate world. A funeral is not a great investment; it is a sad moment in a family's history. It is not a hedge against inflation; it is a rite of passage. It is not a retail event; it is an effort to make sense of our mortality. It has less to do with actuarial profits and more to do with actual losses. It is not an exercise in salesmanship; it is an exercise in humanity. Waltrip and his "death-care professionals" ignore such distinctions at their peril. The Main Street consumer, the Wall Street investor and the mainstream press have connected these dots. They seem to be voting in their various ways against globalization in the mortuary trades. Maybe Mission Control shouldn't be in Houston. Maybe the home office should be closer to home. SCI's stock has fallen from the 40s to the mid-teens this year. A portfolio of "death-care" stocks (SRV, STEI, LWN, HB, YRK) is down more than 60 percent from last summer's values. The New York City Department of Consumer Affairs has urged the state attorney general to prevent further acquisitions by SCI in that city. Lawsuits against SCI have been filed by disgruntled investors, outraged families and now, it turns out, the state of Texas' former chief funeral regulator, Eliza May, who claims she was given her walking papers for investigating Waltrip's enterprise on reports of unlicensed personnel embalming bodies. The allegation is that Waltrip complained and the investigation went away. And then the investigator did too. Of course, no one wants to connect the dots between May's dismissal and SCI's paying George Bush Sr. $70,000 for a speech to the International Cemetery and Funeral Association or donating $100,000 to his presidential library or helping George W. with his White House aspirations. Here in Middle America, we funeral directors are not entirely stunned that big business, big money and now big politics may all be aligned against us. We are long accustomed to the slings and arrows. Candidate Bush will not much miss the funeral directors' vote. We are tiny in the firmament of influence. Points of light, his father called them -- who deal with neighbors more than national concerns. Still, skeletons in one's closet notwithstanding, all politics, like all funerals, are local.
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About the writer Table Talk Sound off Related Salon stories The Texas way of death George W. Bush is subpoenaed over the alleged special treatment of a funeral-home mogul who's a big campaign contributor.
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