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“There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven –“. That is the first verse in Ecclesiastes Chapter 3 and the 2nd verse goes on to say “A time to give birth, and a time to die“. Any funeral director who has ever spent time on a…
In a press release made public on the heels of the company’s 3rd Quarter report, Park Lawn Corporation (PLC), with headquarters in Houston, Texas, and Toronto, Ontario, announced that they had acquired the Schrader, Aragon & Jacoby Funeral Home, Mountain View Memorial Park, and Bustard & Jacoby Funerals, Cremation, Monuments and Receptions of Cheyenne and…
2022 marked a point in the history of Great Britain’s largest death care provider, Dignity plc, where they planned to increase consumer market share for their services by lowering their prices. What they maybe didn’t anticipate was the highest inflationary pressures in the last 40 years on the costs of their services to happen at…
The 3rd Quarter of 2022 has shown a trend of less deaths than the comparable 3rd Quarter of 2021. As a matter of fact, as you can see from this report from the Center for Disease Control (CDC), provisional deaths for 3Q 2022 numbered 751,497 as compared to 874,495 in the same quarter of 2021. …
November 11th brings back memories in many countries. It’s not just Veteran’s Day in America. . . it is a day of remembrance all over Europe. Originally referred to as Armistice Day (Armistice, in Latin, means to “stand arms”). It was at 11 am on November 11 (11/11) in 1918 that an agreement was reached…
We’ve all talked about it and see it out in the profession — a lack of trained and licensed funeral directors to combat the coming years when America faces a wave of Baby Boomer deaths. Without the influx of new professionals, many funeral homes will be understaffed which can lead to a vicious cycle of…
Because I report on them, and partly because I just like learning what is happening, I generally read the “Earnings Call Transcripts” that take place every quarter between the public company death care executives and the financial brokers that cover their companies. If you’ve never read these they end up being a “give and take”…
I’ve worked almost my entire career under the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) “Funeral Rule”. The rule, for all practical purposes, required me to introduce “price” into the conversation whenever someone either called the funeral home or walked into the funeral home and asked about funeral, cremation, or memorial services. It also required me to hand…
Last week death care property owner and operator StoneMor announced, in this press release, that they had completed their merger with Axar Capital Management whereby StoneMor will become a private and wholly owned subsidiary of Axar Capital Management. Prior to this “take private” movement, which was announced in this May 25, 2022, press release, Axar…
The streets of Death Care and the avenues of Entertainment don’t seem to collide too often at an intersection. But every once in a while they do and when they do it generally leads to some publicity. According to this article from Bloomberg that intersection just happened with a highly performing music video by artist…
