Cremation
It is always interesting to see what is happening in the death care profession around the world. We recently came across this article from the Connexion with news from France that indicates the growing trend of cremation is also occurring in that country. According to that article 63% of the people asked in 2018 said…
According to an article from the United Kingdom’s Telegraph which you can read here, funeral director Catherine Powell encountered a family a few years ago that explicitly said all they wanted was a cremation with the ashes returned to them. Nothing more. Powell complied and the customer was very pleased. Powell remembers thinking that if…
Yesterday we published an article dealing with the on going price wars for “Simple” cremation in the United Kingdom. It made me wonder about the different pricing methods used by full service funeral establishments in dealing with their cremation clients. For the sake of our discussion, in this article, we are dealing with those full…
If you are or have been in the death care business for any length of time you can relate to all the talk about the popularity of cremation gaining in the last twenty years and at an incredible pace for the past 5-7 years. All of us know of the issues that lower revenue per…
In the last couple of days I have read articles from different areas of the United States pertaining to the establishment of “Green Cemeteries” in those locales. The first you can read here and comes from the southern portion of Illinois and concerns the City of Carbondale turning a city cemetery over to the option…
Over thirty-five years as an owner operator of a community funeral home I made hundreds of business decisions. Some were easy, some were hard, some worked out, some didn’t. The one common denominator is that I did my research and thought that I was doing the right thing to either help the community or gain…
The Cremation Association of North America just wrapped up its weeklong gathering of cremation professionals at CANA2018. While I did not attend, I have kept up with some of the issues that were discussed and saw a quote come out of the convention that I wanted to discuss further. The quote I am referring to…
According to this article from the Pine Journal, Bob and Karen Atkins operate the Atkins-Northland Funeral Home and Crematory in Cloquet, Minnesota. The couple is responsible for a business with a volume of about 160 deaths annually and when the cremation percentage started to rise they decided to put in a human crematory instead of…
