The Village Voice: Machine Age: Beyond the Grave
Published November 3 - 9, 1999
(illustration: Jonathan Weiner)
BEYOND THE GRAVE
BY JEFF HOWE
E-Commerce Crosses Into the Next World
It was only a matter of time. The Internet has irrevocably changed our
lives. Was there any reason to expect it wouldn't also change our
deaths?
Well, yes. The 'death care' industry—the curious name for the
business of
corpse disposal—has had every reason to resist change. Death isn't a
trendy business. The last great shake-up in death care took place after
thousands of Americans viewed an impeccably embalmed President Lincoln
occupying an ornate mahogany casket. Plywood coffins, living-room
funerals, and au naturel body display went out the door; by the end
of the
century, funeral homes were a fixture in the typical American town.
Honoring the dead got expensive, and death became big business.
According
to Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death Revisited, published in
1998, the total average cost of an adult's funeral in this country is
$7800.
But as the boom in e-commerce adequately illustrates, if you can sell
it,
you can sell it online. This makes funeral directors very nervous. The
Internet promotes a special brand of rough-and-tumble price warfare;
funeral directors, on the other hand, are accustomed to customers with
little appetite for bargaining. For years, a general collusion between
funeral directors and casket manufacturers insured that interment was
always a seller's market. The top three casket makers sell only to
licensed directors, and several states (though not New York) have laws
making it illegal for anyone else to sell a casket. Funeral directors
recoup a great deal of their expenditure through casket sales, and this
circumstance, says Lamar Hankins, board president of the Funeral
Consumers
Alliance, allows directors to rig the market at the expense of the
consumer.
"There's been an abundance of price gouging, and not just with
caskets,"
says Hankins. "One of the funeral chains in Austin bumped up their
embalming fee by 250 percent. There's just no excuse for that." Of
course,
a virtual embalming would leave something to be desired, but what the
Web
can do, Hankins points out, is educate the consumer. The Funeral
Consumers
Alliance site, for instance, provides information on casket
alternatives
(cardboard!) and posts price guidelines for funeral services.
Currently,
online casket retailers make up only about 1 percent of total sales.
But
now that 30 percent of seniors are online, with more on the way, that
figure is sure to increase. This won't drive funeral directors out of
business, but it will cut into their profits.
"Internet retailers have no building, and they don't have the same need
for recovery of business costs," says Bonnie Tippy, executive
director of
the New York State Funeral Directors Association. The advent of
independent retailers—online and off—has already forced down casket
prices. But caskets are not the point, Tippy says. "I think that as
soon
as we reduce one of the main rituals of life to such a dollar-and-cents
issue, then we're negating the importance of it."
Which isn't to say that funeral directors are ignoring the Internet
entirely. Tippy admits that, "like other types of Main Street
businesses,
funeral directors have been slow to recognize the importance of the
Web."
But most would like to use technology to provide value-added services,
like Webcasting a funeral ceremony for friends and families unable to
attend in person.
A few companies want to offer much more. HeavenlyDoor focuses on
"preselling" funeral services. On its site, the would-be dead can
find the
nearest mortuary, comparison shop for funereal accoutrements, and
link to
various businesses in their area. And that's not all: HeavenlyDoor
features "virtual visits" to loved ones' grave sites and an online
obituary. Eventually, HeavenlyDoor would like to provide one-stop
shopping
for funeral services, from crematoriums to funeral homes to casket
sellers. Another site, the California-based Plan4ever, is competing to
provide a similar package. It currently hosts a "virtual garden" where
obituary and "guest book" copy runs against a screen shot of
mountains or
palm trees, or, in the instance of the celebrity garden, the
paparazzo's
flashing camera.
But wait, it gets weirder: Targeted at artists, writers, and similarly
otherworldly types, The Final Curtain (slogan: "Death got you down?")
plans to build a worldwide chain of graveyard–art museums, wherein its
customers will design their memorials according to the most whimsical
of
whims. One customer (not Damien Hirst) wants a perpetual video feed
on his
rotting corpse. The Final Curtain is now soliciting artist submissions;
the winner will receive—you guessed it—a free burial plot.
Still, says Tippy, the Internet can offer the dead, and their
survivors,
only so much. "Someone still needs to take that phone call at 3 a.m.,
get
dressed, go get Grandma, take her somewhere, and get her prepared.
Someone
has to bury the dead."
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