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I used to be a funeral director. The majority of outsiders were unaware of pretty much everything we did. Often on purpose because thinking of death is uncomfortable.
The biggest "secret" is probably that the modern funeral was invented by companies the same way diamond engagement rings were. For thousands of years the only people who had public funerals were rich and famous. It was the death of Abraham Lincoln that sparked the funeral industry to sell "famous people funerals at a reasonable price". You too could give your loved one a presidential send off! The funeral industry still plays into this hard, and I've found many people are simply guilt tripped by society to have a public funeral.
Not so fun story:
One of my first jobs when I was barely 18 was with one of the big funeral home/cemetery providers in the US. It was positively horrible, and not for the reasons most people think.
As a new hire, you’d start on the cold-calling phone banks, which was bad enough. Nobody wants a cold marketing call from a cemetery. But it got worse from there.
After a month on the phone bank, I’d done well enough to be promoted to field sales, which meant going to the most impoverished areas of town to follow up on the appointments the phone bank had made, basically trying to scare poor elderly people into handing over what little they had to ‘pre-plan’ for their deaths, with the pitch that if they didn’t, their family would suffer.
After a few appointments it was clear I didn’t have the stomach for that, so they moved me to on-site sales, which was somehow worse.
On-site sales included helping to host the Mother’s Day open house at the large main cemetery. They set up a greeting station at the entrance with refreshments and ‘in memorium’ wreaths that could be bought by bereaved family (on that day, mostly children of the deceased, but also mothers who had lost their children, some at a very young age). It sounds like a kind thing to do, because many young mothers/fathers coming to visit were so distraught, they hadn’t stopped for coffee or thought about flowers.
I was not stationed at the welcome station. I was a ‘roamer’, meaning I was one of several staff expected to meander through the graves and check on families graveside – to ask if they needed anything and to upsell them pre-planning packages for themselves or their other children. I am not kidding, we were expected to do that.
I had to be prodded to approach my first mark (a young couple ‘celebrating’ the woman’s first Mother’s Day at the grave of her several months old child, and I couldn’t stomach it. It felt barbaric, to even try to sell someone who could not stop crying at the grave of her young child. I couldn’t do the pitch, obviously, and backed out as soon as possible, then hid by the skips behind the main building until the end of the day when I quit.
I’ve done many jobs in my life, including cleaning bowling alley toilets, but I’ve never been asked to do anything as vile.
I’ll bet everyone in the funeral industry can guess which company I’m talking about.
I also had the pleasure of working for Service Corporation International. Thankfully solicitation of funeral services is banned in Ontario, Canada. So no cold calling or bugging people at cemeteries. Their way around it was to hold seminars about Last Wills at places like retirement homes. If someone had a funeral related question the staff would get them to sign a form agreeing to a phone call or visit from a sales person.
The pre-arrangement sales people were all on commission and it made them very pushy. The pitches were so manipulative I couldn't listen to them. Our government is throwing around the idea of banning commissioned sales in funeral services as well because of it. Some other Canadian provinces have already banned it.
Their practices are so scummy, I’m surprised they’re still allowed to operate at all in Canada. Glad they can’t do their worst in Ontario, that’s a small win.
You’re right about their abhorrent manipulation – I still have binders in storage from my sales training; I should dig them up and post some of it. It’s still, 35 years later, the most disgusting emotional manipulation I’ve ever seen. After all these years, it’s only got worse in the US from what I hear.
You were supposed to ask them to relive their most recent familial death experience under the guise of polite conversation, then hone in on whatever detail was the most unpleasant, and hammer home how if they didn’t buy a package, their children would go through worse. Have they considered how much emotional and financial pain they would cause if, god forbid, they died tomorrow? Don’t take time to think about the money you don’t have, because every hour of delay raises the chances your kids will be left with a financial mess when they’re grieving you. You’re basically heartless for doing that to them.
The graveside pitch was even worse. It’s so sad you lost your baby last month, but what if your six-year-old died tomorrow? Are you prepared for that? Like jesus, I can’t imagine the paranoia a grieving family faces after losing one child, constantly afraid for their remaining child. Let’s rub salt in that wound and scare the shit out of them for a few thousand dollars. It should be illegal everywhere.
What do you mean by "public funeral"? What's the alternative? It sounds like you'd consider an event with only friends and family where there was a coffin in a room to be a "public funeral". That seems to be what most people have, but it isn't very public. Is a non-public funeral one where the family makes the coffin themselves and there's no event where people see the dead person and the coffin?
The minimal services are essentially transportation, government documentation, and disposition (cremation, burial, entombment, etc). Some funeral homes won't charge for a private viewing by immediate family, some charge a small fee. Typically there's a cap on number of people and amount of time, something like 10 people total for 30 minutes.
Anything more than that will require you pay thousands of dollars extra. Hours of receiving guests, a published obituary, a mass or ceremony, musicians, clergy/celebrants, reception. All of those are pushed as "traditional" or expected but they're incredibly expensive.
You didn't talk about how coffins are sold for many thousands of dollars when they are just cheap plywood boxes that shouldn't cost more than a hundred bucks and that serve no purpose other than to decay as quickly as possible.
While I do think expensive caskets are a waste of money, they're actually one of the least marked up products sold at a funeral home! Typically, caskets and urns are sold for twice what they're bought for wholesale. This is mostly because anyone can sell caskets and urns so they can't have ridiculous markups or people will go elsewhere for them. Urns for example are almost always bought off Amazon instead of at a funeral home.
The products with the highest markups were insurance based. Estate Fraud insurance (if someone steals the dead person's identity, the insurance company will pay any costs involved in correcting it) and Travel insurance (if you die on vacation, the insurance company will pay any costs involved in bringing the body home). Both of these insurance policies had real costs of about $10 or $20. They're often sold for $300 to $500.