Funeral Director Daily

Burial in a Mushroom Suit

By Funeral Director Daily / May 13, 2019 /

We have written that funeral wishes and choices by the consumer is ever expanding in the death care market.  We have written that the choices and alternatives outside of traditional earth burial and cremation continue to expand.  Last October we wrote about a process, created by a company called Coeio, in which a deceased is…

Another way to honor our Veterans — VetTix

By Funeral Director Daily / May 10, 2019 /

Part of our duty here at Funeral Director Daily is to pass information and ideas that we have learned about on to working funeral directors.  By doing so, we hope to give those funeral directors additional tools to help ease the lives of those they serve. Over the years we have told you where you…

Will Tulip Cremation make a difference

By Funeral Director Daily / May 9, 2019 /

I mentioned earlier this week that I spent last week in Las Vegas with about 150 people in our profession.  Lots of items get bantered about at this event and one that was visited about quite frequently last week was the opening of Tulip Cremations. While I have only anecdotal knowledge of Tulip Cremation, I…

Fashion. . . .and the funeral

By Funeral Director Daily / May 8, 2019 /

While this is a little out of the ordinary for Funeral Director Daily, I ran across a couple of articles that deal with fashion and/or fashion for the funeral director this week.  Without much commentary I just thought they might be interesting for you to read. . . The first is a letter to Dear…

Who drives the choices?

By Funeral Director Daily / May 7, 2019 /

I spent three days last week in Las Vegas with about 150 other people from the death care profession.  The group is a wide mix of people, with all of us having the death care industry in common.  Some are small funeral home owner/operators like me, some are CEOs of the largest public death care…

Looking back to the men who rode

By Funeral Director Daily / May 6, 2019 /

I’m a life-long Lutheran and have attended the same church since I was born.  As a matter of fact, my great-grandfather, where the roots for our funeral home business come from as he started out as a cabinet maker who then built coffins to order – is one of six men listed on the charter…

New York cemetery moves caskets without notification, State investigating

By Funeral Director Daily / May 3, 2019 /

Today we bring you this story that broke earlier this week out of West Seneca, New York.  It deals with the movement of about 220 buried caskets from one part of a cemetery to another part of that same cemetery.  You can see a story and news video about this from WKBW of Buffalo here.…

Park Lawn Corporation moves into St. Louis market

By Funeral Director Daily / May 2, 2019 /

In a press release out of Park Lawn Corporation headquarters in Toronto, Ontario, today, the company announced that it had acquired the assets of two-location funeral business John L. Ziegenhein & Sons Undertaking, Inc.  According to the press release that you can read here, the Ziegenhein Funeral Homes were acquired for a purchase price of…

Carriage Services 1st Quarter — Total Revenue Drops

By Funeral Director Daily / May 2, 2019 /

Houston based funeral home and cemetery consolidator and operator Carriage Services reported its 1st Quarter 2019 results yesterday.  Their report somewhat parroted industry leader Service Corporation International’s report from a week ago in that “Same Unit” revenues dropped.  In Carriage’s case, however, even with new acquisition revenue added in, their 2019 revenues of $69.1 million…

Is there hidden value in crematory physical plants?

By Funeral Director Daily / May 1, 2019 /

I read an interesting article the other day published by Reuters out of Tokyo, Japan.  It piqued my interest because I have seen in the recent past and believe going forward that new crematory facilities will continue to be a challenge to get built in locations across North America. My belief stems from the fact…