Business

Affinity programs and the funeral business

By Funeral Director Daily / August 5, 2021 /

Recently a new Casey’s Gas and Convenience store opened near me.  Now, it is not the first Casey’s in our community, but it is very convenient to my home.  So, I purchase gasoline, coffee, donuts, and made to order pizza there more often than any other store in town.  I’m not a easy mark as…

Death Tech — will new technologies move forward

By Funeral Director Daily / August 2, 2021 /

Want to deliver the audio at your own funeral with a text written after your death by your pastor or other spokesman?  Evidently, voice synthesizing technology can now make that happen. . . . a written text will mimic  your own voice, even after death giving you the opportunity to deliver your own funeral sermon.…

Meet Singapore’s all female embalming team

By Funeral Director Daily / July 27, 2021 /

Every once in a while I come across an article which reminds me how much the actual inner workings of a funeral business has changed.  And sometimes paradoxically, the same article or articles can point out that what I’m looking at is not so much a change as it is an evolution. Today I will…

How will death care fare in an “upside down” world?

By Funeral Director Daily / July 26, 2021 /

I read this interesting short article (and video news story) authored by Myles Udland at Yahoo Finance the other day.  In the article, he surmises about “the role that demand is playing in the economic recovery.”  According to Udland, you can “throw a dart at just about anywhere in the economy and you’ll find unmet demand…

The value of non-conventional marketing

By Funeral Director Daily / July 23, 2021 /

It’s hard for me to believe that I now call Direct Mail, Radio, and Newspaper advertising “non-conventional”.  When I started in the business that was about as “conventional” as it got. However, when I am looking online for products to buy I’ve become accustomed to looking at the “Reviews” or the “Star Ratings” now.  I…

Congress working to stop “Body Brokers”

By Funeral Director Daily / July 22, 2021 /

It was probably ten years ago when I, as a funeral director, received a phone call from a member of a family whose father was on hospice care.  The family member told me that his father “wanted his body donated to science” and had made arrangements for a private company to help them do that. …

Hospice provider to give “assistance with funeral arrangements”

By Funeral Director Daily / July 21, 2021 /

I’ve been on this bandwagon a long time and I can see it coming down the road.  The bandwagon I’m talking about is “hospice providers becoming part of the death care profession”. In this article from Hospice News you can read about hospice provider Compassus beginning a pilot progam to, among other things, “assist with…

Funeral service. . . . .by the numbers

By Funeral Director Daily / July 20, 2021 /

Funeral Director Daily published this article last week that we titled “We saw a lot of deaths in 2020”.  The article tried to put a number to the number of death care cases across the United States in our Covid-19 pandemic year.  We came up with the number of 3,427,321 which was a 20% increase…

The regulatory environment for 2021

By Funeral Director Daily / July 19, 2021 /

It’s not all that common but it does happen in the death care profession from time to time.  The “it” I’m talking about is regulatory infractions that can cause a funeral home or other other death care business, such as a crematory, to be shut down for some period of time. When it does happen…

We saw a lot of deaths in 2020

By Funeral Director Daily / July 16, 2021 /

An article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune which you can access here was headlined, “U.S. overdose deaths hit a record 93,000 in pandemic last year”.  The article went on to say that the calendar year 2020 saw a record number of deaths due to drug overdoses in the year. . . an increase of 29%…