As we age it is interesting how things from the past can be brought back to memory. It’s the season of political primaries and an article from the Ohio University Scripps College of Communication triggered a memory of mine back to the Summer of 1968. First of all, the article from Ohio University was in honor of alumnus Paul Fusco who photographed the Robert F. Kennedy funeral train. You can see the article here. The memory for me brings back […]
We’ve written about the problem before in this forum. “The problem” being the lack of revenue for historic city and association cemeteries since the country’s cremation rate increased to a majority of dispositions. The increase in cremations has decreased cemetery sales in full body burial lots and interment fees. . . .as a matter of fact, many cemeteries are worried about being able to pay the upkeep bills just to keep the cemeteries open. In California, as you can see […]
The Prudential Company has the “Rock of Gibraltar” logo as an iconic brand differentiator. As a matter of fact the brand logo is one of the oldest and most recognizable in the world. . . . .first appearing for Prudential in 1896 when the company stated, “Prudential has the strength of Gibraltar”. . . . . According to the company’s website, the rock is an icon of “strength, stability, expertise, and innovation.” If you are in the cemetery or funeral […]
Ohio Senate Bill 224 will make over a dozen changes to the state’s funeral and burial laws according to this article from Cleveland.com. The bill will do such mundane things as increasing the price to reactivate a funeral director’s license and it will also establish a more formal process for families to collect money from funeral providers if a customer signed a pre-planned funeral contract, but the family never used that particular facility. One thing it won’t do, however, is […]
Every day when I search for articles that relate to our profession I see multiple articles that deal with “Green Burial”. And, if you follow trends, you will know that the rule is that before trends are adopted in common use, they grow in media articles as people are learning about them. So, I see a lot of articles about “Green Burial”, but I have yet to see, at least in my area, an uptick in the practice. Back in […]
Less than a month ago Funeral Director Daily published this article that questioned if the days of funeral homes and cemeteries helping each other are over. That article questioned the competitive nature of each entity that now sold products historically affiliated with the other entity as a way of “full service shopping” for death care consumers. For instance, funeral homes are now, more than ever, actively selling monuments and cemeteries, now more than ever, sell burial vaults and urns. Nobody […]
In Minnesota being at the “Lake Cabin” from Memorial Day to Labor Day is cherished time. We are having our cabin kitchen remodeled this winter and expect to purchase new appliances to be in place by Memorial Day. It’s interesting as we look at appliances to purchase “availability dates” are a new variable in what we are going to be buying. “Availability dates” have up until this time never been an issue when buying products in my lifetime. However, the […]
Throughout my entire career in a small community, the funeral homes and the cemeteries helped each other out. We had somewhat of a mutual dependence on each other that helped us both. For instance, when our funeral home served a family we would always suggest earth burial or entombment for the full body casketed funeral as well as for the cremation that would need a place for permanent memorialization. We were happy to send the family over to the, mostly […]
I recently finished Bill O’Reilly’s book “Killing the Mob”. It is one of about a dozen books in a series by O’Reilly all with the “Killing” titles. I’ve learned that “Killing” is just the title series and the books are really about the history of people, movements, and time periods. Of the books I’ve read about include history of President Lincoln, President Kennedy, the American/Japanese battles of World War II, and the history of the American Indians during the 1800’s. […]
I would guess it was twenty years ago or about that length of time that I was asked to volunteer as a board member of our community’s largest non-denominational cemetery. The cemetery was large enough and did enough business that it had a full-time caretaker who took care of sales, provided interment services using cemetery owned equipment, and supervised a small staff of part-time lawn care workers. The cemetery also had a monument sales representative who worked on commission. Revenue […]
