A Boring Dystopia

I was a funeral director for 9 years but recently left the industry. I didn't feel like I was helping anymore. All of the 5 funeral homes in my town are now owned by 2 corporations. Courts have ruled a corporation cannot buy out all the funeral homes in one town, so these corporations work together to divide up towns.

The main concern of corporations are things like low accounts receivables, high insurance sales, high sales of packages, and corporate stock price. Our offices had TVs that displayed these stats on a loop and ranked corpoate owned funeral homes as well as their individual staff based on these numbers. Staff with subpar numbers would be given "coachings" and "retraining". I got a lot of those. I was coached not to "fall for sad stories" and how to judge what a person can afford by looking at the car they drove, what they were wearing, and slyly asking what they do for work.

Some of the coaching were beyond shady and straight up illegal. Local regulations required that we show our least expensive option to all clients. My bosses would instruct me to hide those options unless it was obvious the client couldn't afford anything else. Local regulations prevented me from making untrue statements. I was told to present our premium package that 15% of people purchased as "our most popular package". It was not. The cheap package was our most popular package, but also, most clients did not purchase a package as it was less expensive to just buy the things they wanted individually.

When I brought up that clients were unhappy, bosses would regularly tell me "So what? Are they going to go to X Funeral Home? Cause we own that one too." The entire focus was making the KPI numbers go up. I get that this is how corporations operate, but we were selling funerals not cars. It just didn't feel right.

My advice is to determine how important funeral services are to you. The modern day funeral is an idea crafted by funeral homes to make money. If you really like the idea, be prepared to pay for it, but don't feel like you have to. There's nothing wrong with organizing a small service on your own with you and close family. There's nothing wrong with not having a tombstone. Determine how important it is to you and don't let others pressure you into spending money on something you don't value.