Business
As just a lay person and/or consumer it seems that I am constantly hearing two things about wages in America. On one hand, it seems that I hear people advocating for, regardless of the market situation, wages that should be at a minimum of $15 to $20 per hour in any line of employment. On…
According to this article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the 91-year old H.M. Patterson and Son Spring Hill Chapel in Midtown will be closing at the end of business today – Friday, January 10. The funeral business and its adjacent gardens, which had reached “Landmark Status” was purchased by a developer in December. The new owners,…
A couple of days ago the world not only broke into a new decade, but the turning over of the calendar into 2020 also signified a milestone for our little newsletter, Funeral Director Daily. Last week we passed into the realm of going over 1,000 daily subscribers to the blog I created just to stay…
In America we have been fortunate that in my lifetime forces have kept the economy stable. Yes, I can remember when I started in the business that bank certificate of deposits on funeral trust funds paid 16% annually – but that was for a very short period of time. The economic stability of America lets…
I wrote on Monday about the change in the “place of death”. In that article I pointed out that in the early 1900s people tended to die at home and much of the funeral experience was then held in the home. While I never did it, I am old enough to have had funeral directors…
This article which ran first in the New York Times but which I found in Saturday’s Minneapolis Tribune deals with the fact that death is trending to happen more often in homes rather than in institutions for the first time in over half a century. The article states that in 2017 (the latest year statistics…
I came across this article last week which describes the work of Victor Sweeney as the single funeral director in the rural Minnesota town of Warren. Sweeney describes what he does and why he loves taking care of people at the time of death. The article also goes into the state of the profession in…
2019 is soon coming to a close and I’ve thought about what has this year taught me in relation to the death care industry. There has been mergers and acquisitions, there has been the legalization of recomposition, there has been the continued growth of the alkaline hydrolysis business and more. However, one of the items…
I operated a small town funeral home for about 35 years. Every year I completed budgets and put expectations on the number of death calls the firm would do as well as predicted our market share in the community. I was tough with myself. . . .I had high expectations. Fortunately, I operated in a…
Recompose, the public benefits corporation that is moving the process of recomposition (human composting) into the commercial realm recently held a forum at the Feldman Mortuary in Denver, Colorado. The forum was used to introduce the idea of recomposition to the Colorado market and also to announce that two Colorado legislators plan to introduce a…
