The American Way of Death Revisited

8. GOD’S LITTLE MILLION-DOLLAR ACRE

There’s gold in them thar verdant lawns and splashing fountains, in them mausoleums of rugged strength and beauty, in them distinctive personalized bronze memorials, in them museums and gift shops. Concept: The Journal of Creative Ideas for Cemeteries—the very title vibrates with the thunder of progress—circulated in 1963 to America’s five thousand then operating cemeteries, to whom it imparted many an idea on how the gold can best be mined and minted.

The cemetery as a moneymaking proposition is new in this century. The earliest type of burial ground in America was the churchyard. This gave way in the nineteenth century to graveyards at the town limits, largely municipally owned and operated. Whether owned by church or municipality, the burial ground was considered a community facility; charges for graves were nominal, and the burial ground was generally not expected to show a profit.

Prevailing sentiment that there was something special and sacred about cemetery land, that it deserved special consideration and should not be subjected to such temporal regulation as taxation, was reflected in court decisions and state laws. A cemetery company is an association formed for “a pious and public use,” the United States Supreme Court said in 1882, and more recently the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that a cemetery, even if privately owned, is a public burial ground “whose operation for purposes of profit is offensive to public policy.” Other rulings have affirmed that land acquired for cemetery purposes becomes entirely exempt from real estate taxes the moment it is acquired, even before a dead body is buried in it.

This traditional view of cemetery land proved a blessing to the land speculators who began to enter the field, and whose handiwork can now be seen on the outskirts of thousands of American communities.

The major premises which, evolved over the years, lie behind modern cemetery operation are all, on the face of it, sound and intelligent enough. Cemetery land is tax-free, which is as it should be, since in theory the land is not to be put to gainful use. Cheap land which for one reason or another does not easily lend itself to such needs of the living as housing and agriculture is commonly used for cemeteries. The purchase of a grave for future occupancy is, surely, a rational and sensible act, showing foresight and prudence on the part of the buyer who wishes to spare his family the trouble and expense of doing so when the need arises. Innovations which result in more economical upkeep of cemeteries, such as dispensing with upright tombstones to facilitate mechanical mowing, seem practical and commendable; so does the establishment of an endowment fund for the future upkeep of the cemetery.

Economies achieved by new and efficient operating methods, tax exemptions such as only schools and churches enjoy, dedication to “pious and public use”—these would all seem to point in the direction of continuously reducing the cost of burial. The opposite has been the case. The cost of burial has soared, at a rate outstripping even the rise in undertakers’ charges. The winning combination that has transformed the modern cemetery into a wildly profitable commercial venture is precisely its tax-free status, the adaptability of cheap land to its purposes, the almost unlimited possibilities of subdividing the land, the availability for reinvestment of huge “perpetual care” resources, and the introduction of “pre-need” installment selling. Given these propitious conditions, there is really no end to the creative ideas that can be put to work by the cemetery promoter.

A very creative idea for cemeteries is to establish them as nonprofit corporations. In California and in many other states, virtually all commercial cemeteries enjoy this privilege. At first glance it would seem an act of purest altruism that somebody should go to all the trouble, at absolutely no profit to himself, to start a cemetery wherein his fellow man may be laid to eternal rest. A second glance discloses that the nonprofit aspect removes the necessity to pay income tax on grave sales. And a really close look discloses that the profits that are now routinely extracted by the promoters of “nonprofit” cemeteries are spectacular beyond the dreams of the most avaricious real estate subdivider.

There is nothing actually illegal about the operation. It works like this: Foreverness Lawn Memory Gardens, Inc., is organized as a nonprofit cemetery corporation, closely controlled by the promoters. Foreverness owns not a scrap of land. The acreage it will use for burial plots is owned by the promoters, either in their own names or, more commonly, in the name of a closely held land company. They enter into a contract with themselves—that is, the land company has a contract with Foreverness which provides that Foreverness will operate the cemetery and sell the graves, the promoters to receive for each grave sold 50 percent of the selling price, and for each mausoleum crypt, 60 percent. Since Foreverness out of its half of the income must bear all of the cemetery’s operating, sales, and maintenance costs, there is little danger that it will lose its chaste nonprofit character. The promoters, for their part, rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars per acre for their low-cost land.[8]

Modern transportation has made it possible for the cemetery, like the supermarket, to be at some distance from commercial centers and high-priced residential sections; therefore land for the vast new “park” cemeteries can often be acquired for a modest cash outlay—sometimes for as little as $300 an acre, more commonly for $500 to $1,500 an acre. (Sometimes, of course, particularly when a mausoleum sales program is planned, the promoters will go higher. A California cemetery announced the purchase of “100 acres of ocean view property” for a reported $5,000 an acre, for the development of “patio-style” mausoleum crypts.)

Having acquired his tax-free, bargain land, the cemeterian (as he likes to be called) starts to get his property ready for occupancy. It is here that creativity begins to come into play.

A real estate promoter who subdivides land for live occupancy may be quite pleased if he can break an acre of land into 50-by-100-foot lots suitable for resale to people who can afford to buy and build. He counts himself lucky if he can squeeze six such lots out of an acre. But consider the cemetery promoter, who routinely breaks his acreage into easy-to-own little packages measuring 8 feet by 3 feet, fifteen hundred or better to the acre, each parcel guaranteed tax-exempt. Fifteen hundred burial spaces per acre is an estimate that errs on the conservative side and would today be considered old-fashioned. For one thing, it allows space for the accommodation of the now outmoded headstone, and it allows 15 percent for drives, walks, and little spaces between graves so that the fastidious or reverent may avoid stepping on the graves to get from one to another. The modern “lawn-type” cemetery, the most creative idea of all, utilizes all this wasted space by simply eliminating footpaths between graves (the paths of glory now lead but to the gift shop and museum) and by banning tombstones altogether, thus making possible unbroken rows of snugly packed 7-by-3-foot graves. The tombstone is replaced by standard bronze markers set flush with the ground—a creative idea which (a) enables the cemetery owners to appropriate from the sale of the plaques profits that formerly went to the monument makers for tombstones, and (b) by opening up the area to huge power mowers,[9] eliminates all need for hand-trimming of grave plots and saves 75 percent of the maintenance cost.

To these innovations cemeteries now add a further refinement: the sale of nice, cozy “companion spaces” for occupancy by husband and wife. The advantage to the promoters is that the companions will repose one above the other in a single grave space, dug “double depth,” to use the trade expression. One Los Angeles “lawn-type” cemetery gives this estimate of its land use:

Another, also in Los Angeles, projects 3,177 “plantings” per acre on land used for ground burial.

It must not be thought that this sort of overcrowding is always the most profitable use of cemetery land. As in the conventional real estate transaction, it is more profitable to offer variety, something to suit every purse and give rein to every social aspiration, and cemetery land—like real estate for the living—is priced according to desirability. There are “view lots” and “garden locations” for those who aspire to be housed among the comfortably well-to-do; nice, roomy “memorial estates” for the really rich; crowded, plainer quarters for those accustomed to tract housing. Neighborhoods develop here too along lines of status and prestige, as well as along religious lines; lodges and clubs are represented by sections set aside for Masons, Lions, veterans’ organizations, and the like.

Prevailing prejudices in the land of the living were at one time mirrored in the land of the dead, and racial segregation as practiced on cemetery land paralleled that which prevailed aboveground. As court decisions forced changes aboveground, cemetery segregation fell back accordingly.

The next trend in cemetery development was upward expansion—the community mausoleum. Here indeed was a breakthrough in the space barrier. There may be limits to how deep one can conveniently dig to bury the dead, but when one is building for aboveground entombment, the sky is literally the limit, and ten thousand mausoleum spaces to an acre is a most realistic yield. Referred to disparagingly by cemeterians as “tenement mausoleums,” these are very In and are an enormously lucrative proposition. Structurally and functionally, they lend themselves ideally to the simplest form of block construction, for they consist merely of tier upon tier of cubicles made of reinforced concrete faced with a veneer of marble or granite. Crypt is stacked upon crypt—six or seven high—two deep, on either side of a visitors’ corridor. The most advantageous size for crypts, we are told, is 32 inches wide, 25 inches high, and 90 inches long.

One large mausoleum construction firm suggests putting a whole acre into crypts, offering the most alluring figures on property potential to be realized from the crypt-filled acre: potential gross sales, $4,308,000; net potential, $2,808,000.

All of the clever planning to extract the maximum use from each acre of land would avail little if the cemetery promoter then had to sit back and wait upon the haphazard whim of the Grim Reaper. With the death rate at its present level, he might have to wait a very long time indeed to begin to realize profit on his investment. This barrier has been brilliantly surmounted by the massive “pre-need” sales campaign, employing squads of telemarketers seeking an invitation to invade the privacy of your home. One of the most successful devices in the history of merchandising, pre-need selling is the key to the runaway growth of the modern cemetery business.

As pre-need sales continue to zoom, it cannot be long before every living American will own a grave, or at least have contracted to pay for one on the installment plan. Perhaps it is this prospect of a saturated market that spurs competing promoters in the race to get there first, to range ever farther in extending their chains of cemeteries to take in even the remotest hamlet. Only this can account for the prodigious rate at which cemetery development and mausoleum construction have been piling up. No community is too small to attract the attention of the promoters: Concept cites the case of a town with a population of less than 750 where a successful 288-crypt mausoleum has been established. A mausoleum building firm reported construction of a 336-crypt “indoor-outdoor” mausoleum in Reserve, Louisiana, which at that time had a population of 1,126.

From the point of view of the cemetery promoter, the special attraction of pre-need selling is its self-financing feature. With little or no cash, he acquires an option on some rural acreage and has it zoned for cemetery use. He has a landscape architect supply him with sketches picturing verdant terraces, splashing fountains, tall cypresses and blooming shrubs, and broad avenues converging on an imposing central “feature” (a word used throughout the trade for “statue”), usually in a religious motif. These can be ordered by catalogue number; popular models are The Good Shepherd, Model 221-Z; Christus; The Sermon on the Mount; The Last Supper. He gets plans and drawings of his mausoleum-to-be from one of the national organizations that specialize in this form of construction. He then contracts with a sales organization that makes a specialty of pre-need selling to handle his sales, and he is in business.

The money comes rolling in, and up to this point not a spadeful of dirt has been turned at the Beautiful Memory Garden; not a cement slab has been poured at the site of the Sweet Repose Mausoleum. It is standard practice in this business not to start construction until at least one-third of all the projected burial and crypt space has been sold. Since this amount is far more than will ever be spent on development and construction, the buyers of these little burial spaces will have furnished the promoter, in advance, with all the capital he will need, and a handsome advance profit as well.

It is not as hard as one might think to extract outrageous-sounding prices from the public, because pre-need payments are customarily made in painless installments over a long period of time. The cemetery owner can, after all, afford to offer generous terms. Unlike any other commodity offered for sale on the installment plan, this one remains always in the seller’s possession, and its use may not be called for until many years after it has been paid for in full. “Sunset View’s ‘Before Need’ ownership plan offers the opportunity for purchasing family lots in monthly installments so small that they are hardly noticeable,” says a circular mailed to me by a local cemetery.

Pre-need selling is a costly proposition, and it is the customer, of course, who ultimately foots the bill. The sales organization usually works on a 50 percent commission; the individual salesman gets 20 to 40 percent of the selling price. “In most cemeteries which have pre-arrangement sales programs, four to ten times more is spent for direct selling than is spent for the total cost of planning, development, and landscaping,” complains a cemetery architect.

The major conglomerates, such as SCI, Loewen, and Stewart, are able to circumvent these high costs by advertising for salespeople, “No experience required.” The hungry hopefuls, once enticed, learn that they will be obliged to meet a sales quota set by the company—one easily met by the novices when they sign up their kith and kin, but impossible to continue once that has been done. It’s a cruel but effective way to market a community at low cost, with no regular employees, no employee benefits.

The “space and bronze deal,” as it is called by the sales specialists, is exciting, heady work. The exuberant buoyancy, the spirit of confidence, the zeal and joie de vivre reflected in the soaring prose of the American Cemetery are in marked contrast to the embattled gloom, the righteous martyrdom, that stalks the pages of the undertaker’s trade magazines.

Before the advent of the commercial cemetery, the principal cemetery executive was the superintendent or head groundskeeper. Today, the unassuming fellow who kept up the cemetery grounds has been supplanted in place of first importance by a more dashing breed—a Memorial Counselor, who in this capacity must quickly acquire a few new postures. An executive of the California Interment Association sees the Memorial Counselor as walking a sort of tightrope: “Exploitation of cemetery sales achievements must assume the proper place in the delicate balance of ethical cemetery practices and the natural American drive to achieve the strongest possible business posture.”

Luckily, it takes only about a week for a person to acquire the right amount of sincerity and truth at a school for Memorial Counselors. The trainee is “schooled in the best methods of gaining access into a home. He must be in a problem-solving frame of mind, and must be one who has come to render a service and not one who has come to sell something. During the week he is reviewed constantly on trial closes and answering objections.” At the end of the week the student is presented with his certificate as “Professional Memorial Consultant.”

In a typical sales argument, the idea of inflation is the first concern to plant in the prospect’s mind:

And another:

Why do the customers buy? The aura of genteel respectability conferred by ownership of cemetery property (often the only piece of real estate the prospect will ever own), the wisdom and economy of advance planning for a contingency that must inevitably arise, are powerful arguments. It sounds good, but the “economy” is a myth and the “wisdom” a snare. The customer in the pre-need era pays far more for burial than he would have in pre-pre-need days. Years ago, while there was no pre-need selling, there was a certain amount of pre-need buying (a most important distinction), generally by those solid citizens—staid families of substantial means—who were accustomed, in this as in other matters, to planning in advance. Acquisition of a “family plot” was not a costly transaction; if a family paid $100 for a four-grave plot, it was paying a lot. Single graves ran from $1 to $20. Even today, people who live in communities that have not yet been invaded by the commercial pre-needers can buy from municipal, denominational, or other noncommercial cemeteries burial space either in advance or when death occurs at a fraction of what they would have to pay a commercial solicitor.

Frequently people do not know of the existence in their community of a publicly owned cemetery; and few take the trouble to go there to make advance arrangements. Those who do so are prosaically just buying a grave, whereas the stay-at-homes, who wait for the Memorial Counselor to call, get so much more for their money: “Ideally a couple in their early years of married life will benefit by making arrangements at that time, affording them protection and economic benefits when they need it most and often creating a psychological bond that may enrich their marital relationship,” says the Interment Association of America.

The advent of the mausoleum boom added a new dimension to the pre-need sales rhetoric. “Talk Mausoleum!” urged Concept; and evaluating the results of a recent direct-mail campaign, it reported, “It was agreed that prestige and horror of ground burial motivated the bulk of replies.”

Mausoleum advertising reaches back into history for its theme—Abraham’s cave, the Pyramids, the tomb of King Mausolus, the Taj Mahal (usually referred to as “the $15,000,000 Taj Mahal”), the “$3,000,000 Lincoln Memorial,” Grant’s Tomb. Concept quotes Tressie Johnson of Texas (“she is a volume producer in mausoleum sales; sincerity plays a great part in her success”) on how to make the most of the historical theme. She suggests mentioning the Taj Mahal, Napoleon, Lincoln, Grant, and Lenin: “But what means even more to the family, tell them Jesus was supposed to have been placed in a rock tomb belonging to Joseph of Arimathea.”

In real life, the brand-new mausoleums mushrooming in communities across the country do not look very much like the Taj Mahal. They look a good deal more like giant egg crates, and the little receptacles have a certain sameness about them—which is not surprising, since they are identical. However, since purchasing power varies from customer to customer, and since those able to pay more should be given every opportunity to do so, distinction and desirability have been conferred on some of the receptacles by the magic of the sales talk.

Like uncounted millions of other Americans, I was visited by a cemetery “Memorial Counselor.” He spread out for my delectation page after page of shiny color representations of rolling lawns, limpid pools, statues of the Good Shepherd, of sundry Apostles; “And here are some of our special Babyland features,” he announced proudly, producing a folder of statues of toddlers and lambs. On each picture was printed in small letters “Artist’s Conception.”

“Can I go out and see it?” I asked.

“Well, there won’t be anything much to see for a while yet; most of it is still in the planning stage. Here’s how the mausoleum is going to look.” He pulled out a folder showing “Preconstruction Corridor” in pink and gray marble, and “Sunshine Garden—An Innovation in Out-of-doors Memorial Construction” in cream and blue. It was gratifying to note that the brochure advertised “Mausoleum staff to serve you every day of the year from sunrise to sunset,” and particularly comforting (in view of the purpose of the property I was being offered) to learn that one’s crypt would be “Judgement Proof.” From the counselor and his brochures I began to get an inkling of how the pricing is established; how liabilities can be transformed into assets, and economies—convenient for the cemetery promoters—made attractive. The crypts facing the corridor are called “mausoleum crypts.” The ones facing outside, and forming in fact the outside wall of the structure, once less salable and therefore lower in price, are now called “garden crypts”—a stroke of creative genius—and often command even higher prices than the stuffy old indoor ones. “It’s all part of the trend towards outdoor living,” explained the counselor. The pavement of the corridors does not go to waste, either. A crypt below floor level has none of the associations of the bargain basement if it is labeled “Westminster Crypt”—on the contrary, it conjures up flattering thoughts of reposing eternally cheek by jowl with the great and famous. Likewise, the cost of a dividing wall between two crypts can be eliminated if they are advertised as a “True Companion Crypt—permits husband and wife to be entombed in a single chamber without any dividing wall to separate them. Here, husband and wife may truly be ‘Together Forever.’ ”

“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.

Whether true or not, recent alleged selling tactics by a Loewen Group sales person have provided ammunition for the reform camp—and made no friends in the major Roman Catholic diocese on Long Island. A Loewen representative, offering a “free crypt” at a nearby Loewen-owned cemetery, made the mistake of approaching Ellen Woodbury, director of cemeteries for the Rockville Centre Catholic Diocese and President of the National Catholic Cemetery Association. It was not a pretty picture—and Ms. Woodbury claims to have captured it all on tape.

“Congratulations,” the voice on the phone told Ellen Woodbury, “You’ve won a free grave.” It was a telemarketer on behalf of The Loewen Group seeking an appointment. As widely reported in the New York Post, one of the first things the sales person did upon arrival was hand the promised “free grave” certificate to Woodbury and her husband. She soon made it clear, however, that the giveaway grave was less than desirable. It was in a section of the cemetery where, she said, the graves are sinking. “Wouldn’t you rather be in the aboveground crypts under development?” the saleswoman asked. She said the “free grave” certificate could be turned in for a discount in a “better” part of the cemetery—and the cemetery would guarantee the Woodburys a 15% discount at a local Loewen-owned funeral home as long as financing was made in advance. As described, a perfectly legal sales pitch was transformed into a blatant cemetery/funeral home tie-in, not to mention a classic bait-and-switch marketing maneuver.

The Loewen saleswoman did not have the good sense to at least stop right there, and apparently went right on to slander the condition of and long-term outlook for Catholic cemeteries in the area. In a letter obtained by this Monitor from Ms. Woodbury to the Diocese of Rockville Centre, she notes: “The part of the presentation which concerned me most was when my husband and I mentioned we were Catholic and felt inclined to choose a Catholic cemetery rather than a non-sectarian one. The counselor insisted that Catholic cemeteries are not maintained as well as Washington Memorial Park, have very limited space, and are definitely not funded, being totally dependent on the diocese in which they are located to support the care and maintenance of the grounds and building in the future. She continued that, as a result of the Church’s current financial condition, there would definitely be no funds available in the future for the maintenance of their cemeteries. When approached, she insisted that even Pope John Paul refused to permit a special cemetery collection to help dioceses offset this expense. These are outlandish statements and lies.”

The state attorney general is reviewing the tape for possible violations of consumer protection laws and other regulations—and The Loewen Group would also appreciate having a copy. Larry Miller, of The Loewen Group’s Cemetery Division, clearly stated that criticism of any religion is not part of the company’s sales program—and vowed to investigate and fire any employee found to be engaging in religion bashing. He also said that Loewen telemarketers are trained to follow a carefully written script and “everything is above board.” According to Miller, the “free grave” offer is genuine and not part of any bait-and-switch scam, and he noted that “thousands” of people have taken advantage of the offer in 38 states in which the company has holdings.

Marketing, as always, is probably one of the touchiest areas in funeral service—given the volatility of the topic and, often, the vulnerability of the client—and this latest dustup only reconfirms the point. Done correctly, there is nothing illegal about telemarketing: A service or product is available at a fair price and you, Mr. and Mrs. Consumer, should know about it.

Certainly, with 9,000 employees, The Loewen Group or any other large mega-business is going to have its share of overzealous sales people who aggressively cross the line into unfair and/or fraudulent marketing ploys. Is the basic problem a compensation system based on commissions? Does that particular motivating factor impel too many sales people over the line? No easy answers here. In conversation with Loewen cemetery division officials, it became clear that commissioned sales people are the traditional—and proven—way to go, and that straight salary or salary/commission combinations have not yielded the optimum sales results. To this Monitor, the key element is to hire the best and insist on sales training—heavy-duty training which explicitly outlines strict limits, largely scripted presentations, and provides no excuse for lack of knowledge about the dos and don’ts.

The Loewen Group and any other deathcare enterprise must maintain a strong company policy against high-pressure selling tactics—and promptly fire those who venture off the reservation. It has been said before: Other businesses can afford their occasional bad apples a lot better than funeral service can.