The funeral home business is an interesting thing. Currently, 85% are family-owned and operated. However, there is a growing trend suggesting that big multi-national corporations are getting their greedy paws on this $20-billion-a-year industry, for better or for worse.

What kind of changes does corporate control bring to the funeral home business? For one, SCI has tried cutting prices for individual items like caskets and urns, but tries to attractively market bundles or packages. As a result, even though the number of funeral services decreased over the past few years, the average revenue increased by about 9%. The big corporation’s competitor Anthony Amigone, president of Amigone Funeral Homes argues, “By staying independently owned, we can keep our prices under control and we can maintain a very high standard of service. Any independent can.”

Secondly, branding has become part of the corporate appeal. Twenty-four-hour “compassion hotline” services are marketed on television, some targeting Latino viewers or other specific demographics. They choose new names like “Dignity Memorial” or “Forever Remembered” to be marketed from coast to coast. Websites will become more elaborate and marketing techniques could begin to edge out the smaller competition. However, many argue that the appeal of the family-owned funeral parlor will never die because people generally associate higher levels of care and fairer prices from the independents.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 10:42 pm and is filed under News & Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.