The American Way of Death Revisited (16 page)

“Then, the corridor crypts would all be one price, the garden crypts another, and so on?” I asked. Oh no, said the counselor, there’s quite a difference. The corridor crypts vary considerably; the cheapest are the ones near the top. “And the most expensive?” “Heart level,” he replied, tapping that organ with his right hand and giving one of his sincere looks.

Later, when I went to see the cemetery, I could see why the counselor was not too anxious to have prospects go out there. It was merely an expanse of dusty, dried-out California hillside, with a fine view of the factories and warehouses of the industrial section below. The Lifetime Green artificial grass mats stacked near the office offered a lurid contrast to the vistas of brown land on either side; the mausoleum was a stunted dwarf compared with the massive structure of the “Artist’s Conception.” The “features” were apparently also in the future, except for a rather forlorn-looking huge tin Bible at the entrance. A small slope, about the size of a town dweller’s back garden, was already converted into graves; I counted seventeen of them, and six occupied crypts in the mausoleum. The Memorial Counselor had accurately told me that of fifteen hundred burial places sold, only twenty-three were actually in use.

The profit potential of a cemetery does not by any means end with the sale of burial space. Adjuncts of cemetery operation, such as the digging, planting, trimming, and general maintenance of graves, which fifty years ago (before the advent of the commercial cemetery) were looked upon simply as chores to be handled by the groundskeeper or the sexton, are today systematically turned to good account. And there are today many extra profit items for the cemetery owner which played no part in cemetery operation or finance in the days before Forest Lawn became the arbiter of fashion in the burial world—the sale of vaults, bronze grave markers, flowers, postcards, and statuary, and the collection, control, and management of huge “perpetual care” funds.

A generation ago, gravedigging and markers were provided by cemeteries at a nominal cost.
Park and Cemetery
(a fuddy-duddy forerunner of
Concept
) reported in 1921 that cemeteries in Seattle were charging $7 for opening and closing a grave. Now a mechanized operation, opening and closing a grave can be completed in about fifteen minutes. Today, cemeteries are charging $600 to $900 for this service, even more on Sundays and holidays. Opening a mausoleum vault, which means simply removing the 25-by-32-inch faceplate, will cost a comparable amount. Zestiest of all for the cemetery are the charges made for opening niches to contain urns in the columbarium. The faceplate of a small niche measures 14 by 14 inches; the charge for opening it in the Neptune Society’s San Francisco columbarium
is $300. What needs to be done to open it? I asked an undertaker. “It’s all in the wrist,” he replied. The cost of a niche runs upward from $3,500, but this, I was assured, includes all charges for care “in perpetuity.”

Other profit items which the commercial cemetery tries to preempt for itself are the sale of vaults, grave liners, and markers.

The cement marker, once a threat to bronze sales, is no longer a problem. The commercial cemeteries, authorized by law to make their own rules, simply prohibit their use. The cemetery’s specifications for. the size, shape, and installation of the bronze, granite, or granite-and-bronze markers which they now require are likely to be so stringent as to make it inconvenient to buy this commodity elsewhere, or to have it installed by an outside supplier. The ordinary bronze marker, inscribed with the name of the deceased and his dates of birth and demise, sells for about $350 for a single grave. The standard cemetery markup is 100 to 200 percent.

In areas already saturated with grave and mausoleum sales, a second pressing of the vintage, so to speak, can be harvested by selling bronze markers “in advance of need” to people who have already purchased interment space. Although I find it hard to picture the customer placing the order for his own memorial ahead of time (“How shall I order the inscription? ‘To My Dearly Beloved Self,’ perhaps, or just simply ‘Dear Me’?”), such sales are being made in substantial volume.

The bronze deal, whether pre-, post- or at-need, can be greatly facilitated by the use of sales letters, which are followed up by telephone calls and personal visits from the Bronze-Memorial Counselors. The Matthews Memorial Bronze Company has prepared dozens of suggested sales letters with which the cemetery can pepper lot holders at appropriate intervals:

Some of the letters are geared to seasonal use: “Dear Friend, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” … “Dear Friend, In a few weeks the forsythia and daffodils will raise their golden horns to the sky and trumpet in the warm winds of spring.” … “Dear Friend, Soon the year will repeat its old story.” … “Dear Friend, Soon Easter will be upon us once again.” … “Dear Friend, The second Sunday in May is Mother’s Day.” … “Dear Friend, Does Memorial Day make you think about a drive in the country?” … “Dear Friend, Decoration Day is just a few short weeks away.” … “Dear Friend, Once again Christmas is almost here.” After four or five paragraphs of trumpeting forsythia or happy Mom’s Day visits, the point is made: “But if you want bronze memorialization by the holiday, you’ve got to act swiftly. You see, it takes many weeks to individually handcraft and deliver the memorial of your selection.”

Another tactic being used by cemeteries is to contact lot owners, asking them to come in so the cemetery can update its new computer. Once there, the future resident is reminded of the ever-looming threat of inflation and persuaded to purchase vault and memorials “now.” Opening and closing can be paid for in advance, too, and one Virginia gentleman was induced to plunk down $900—to cover the weekend or holiday rates, just in case.

Just what happens to the money that is collected on the “pre-need bronze deal” is not quite clear. The pre-need space buyer receives for his money a salable ownership interest in an existing bit of real estate, whereas the pre-need “bronze” buyer receives only a certificate telling him that when he dies a piece of metal will be manufactured and set in his grave. The seller meantime—and it may be a very long time—has the use not only of the money paid for the memorial-to-be, but an additional sum which the purchaser has been obliged to pay for its perpetual care! Regulatory laws that might give the buyer some measure of protection have not yet, in many states, been enacted.

Another idea used by most cemeteries is the “perpetual care fund.” The uninitiated might expect that, having paid a pretty penny for a crypt or a grave, the costs of upkeep might be borne by the cemetery. Not at all. There is added to the cost of cemetery and mausoleum space a surcharge of 10 to 20 percent for future care; some mausoleums charge as much as 25 percent of the price of the crypt.
Graves need tending, it is true, but the care that needs to be lavished on a cement crypt is somewhat hard to envisage.

The monies so collected are kept by the cemetery owner, supposedly as an endowment fund to guarantee such care forever in the future, a promise palpably incapable of fulfillment. Nevertheless, the magic of pre-need selling has swelled these funds in many cases to huge proportions. The money held in such funds in the United States totaled over $1 billion in 1961 and has swelled to over $20 billion in the ensuing thirty-five years.

The cemetery operators to whom these funds have been entrusted have not always been as scrupulously honest in their stewardship as one might hope. The itinerant promoter who moves his sales crew into a community to saturate it with pre-need sales is hardly the type one would expect to sit around and wait for his sold-out cemetery to fill up, much less wait forever to lavish perpetual care upon it. And when he moves on to the next community, he has not always been able to resist the temptation to take the perpetual care fund with him—for safekeeping, of course, or at least to dip into it for a loan at low interest to purchase new cemetery property. After all, the money is there to be invested.

A fund of over $20 billion, available for investment at the discretion of cemetery owners, can serve as a powerful political weapon. Only after the misappropriation of funds became a public scandal did a few state legislatures begin to impose legal controls on the investment of cemetery trust funds. The potent cemetery lobby (it is the envy of the funeral directors, who carry less weight in the state legislatures) has contrived to secure laws that are not unduly burdensome, and in some states the regulation of perpetual care funds is placed under the benign authority of a board composed entirely of cemetery owners.

Municipal cemeteries are operated as a public service and are often partially subsidized by public funds. Since they do not as a rule advertise, or send salesmen out on commission, they are able to offer cemetery space and services at moderate cost.

What happens when, for the first time, commercial cemeteries move into a community where there is already a municipal cemetery? A sales team blankets the community, sells pre-need lots at from three to ten times the price charged by the municipal cemetery, which has
no advertising or pre-need promotion budget. The reaction of the city fathers is likely to be, “Now that sufficient burial space is available from a private source, why spend money to operate a municipal cemetery?” or, “Let’s raise our rates and make it self-supporting—if they can do it, why can’t we?” In the latter case, the municipal cemetery gets itself an advertising appropriation, perhaps hires a crew of pre-need salesmen, and up go the charges correspondingly.

Cemetery men have also found in pre-need selling a means of cutting themselves into the veterans’ market, a source of business from which they would be excluded by the federal laws which give veterans and their wives the privilege of burial in national cemeteries without charge. Pre-need selling enables the cemetery man to outflank the undertaker. He gets into the home first—years ahead of the undertaker, in fact—seduces the family with his glossy catalogues, and points out that the veteran’s $300 burial allowance can be applied to the cost of the grave. That one must die in a VA hospital or nursing home to qualify may never get mentioned.

Pre-need cemetery promoters, in considering whether a particular community is ripe for exploitation, are least of all concerned about whether there is a deficiency of cemetery space. All they want and need to know is how often the town has been previously canvased by pre-need salesmen, and how many householders already own cemetery lots. Consequently, duplication of cemetery facilities goes on apace. Once, in hearings on a cemetery application in Los Angeles, there was testimony from numerous sources that there already existed sufficient cemetery facilities to handle all burials in the Los Angeles area for the next hundred years.

Having saturated a community with pre-need graves, crypts, vaults, and memorials, and having established a perpetual care fund the control of which is firmly under his thumb, how next can the cemetery promoter cash in on his privileged position? It should surprise no one who has come this far that men of vision in the industry have already looked ahead and come up with the ultimate solution: a prepaid package that will include not only burial space and marker but “casket,” hearse, undertaking services, and flower shop as well.

We have seen that funeral home charges are today eight to ten times what they were thirty years ago. And while cemetery prices have increased correspondingly, the leap in profitability has been
nothing short of spectacular. SCI, for example, reported a profit margin of 34 percent for its cemetery operations in 1995, a performance which would do credit to any corporation in the Fortune 500, compared with a still robust 22 percent for its funeral establishments. And the cemeteries in North America that yield the highest returns are those, like Forest Lawn, that have self-contained mortuaries and flower shops. It is these that the corporate consolidators scramble for most avidly, leading to bidding contests that some securities analysts consider rash.

By any standard, it has not been a great public relations year for cemeterians. In California, recent headlines have widely spread the story of grim violations at numerous prominent cemeteries, including disinterment, multiple burials, non-maintenance, and fraud/embezzlement. Now comes New York, where the controversy has taken a new direction and focused not so much on cemetery maintenance, but on ownership policy and marketing practices.

Under New York law, cemeteries are not-for-profit enterprises, regulated in part to help ensure that sufficient money is set aside for perpetual care. The current debate therefore centers on the following questions: Is it proper, then, to allow funeral homes, established to make money, to acquire an interest in cemeteries? And could pressures for profit this year endanger the sanctity of care in the years to come? The State Cemetery Board held a hearing in Albany last week to address these and other issues as part of broader legislation on cemetery reform taking shape in both houses of the New York legislature.

As usual, the hearing placed on public view a distorted image for funeral service. The recent expansion of The Loewen Group and SCI into the New York cemetery market is the underlying factor which has brought the issue to a head. It is no secret that both companies have bought many funeral homes in the region in recent years—and they are increasingly buying cemeteries as well.

The New York State Funeral Directors Association, for one, has mixed feelings about this development. Wayne Baxter testified that his membership is concerned that joint ownership might expose the public to excesses by unscrupulous funeral directors. He said regulations may be needed to ensure that money from the nonprofit cemeteries is not funneled into the profit-making funeral homes—a scenario that is more conceivable with joint ownership. The National Catholic Cemetery Conference, through spokeswoman Ellen Woodbury, also charges “conglomerate ownership” with an “outrageous litany of untruths and misinformation” designed to steer mourners away from religious cemeteries. “We have a 2,000 year old tradition of caring for the dead as a matter of faith, not as a matter of profit,” she said. Finally, Rabbi Elchonon Zohn, speaking for the Jewish Community Relations Council, also considered joint ownership problematic, maintaining that there is an incentive to adopt marketing practices that could generate immediate profits (such as selling two-for-one grave sites), but weaken a cemetery’s ability to maintain care when its space is sold out.