Keeping Up Appearances – The women taking over the funeral industry | Hacker News Reader

Keeping Up Appearances – The women taking over the funeral industry

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59 pointsTMWNN53 comments

I had to work with a funeral home this year and what I found was that private equity has taken over the funeral industry. Don’t assume that a funeral home that seems local actually is.

I have a friend whose family owned a funeral home, but due to unfortunate circumstances were forced to sell it. Now it belongs to an investment company who threw out any sense of respect and slathered it in gaudy baby-blue paint and a sans-serif logo, still keeping the old family name of course. I grimace every time I drive by.

PE has also done this with locally branded veterinarians.

And everything else. Centralization, monopolization, more and more without an end to it. An inevitable outcome of capitalism.

> An inevitable outcome of capitalism.

Not many things are actually inevitable. We could provide smaller companies some regulatory/tax advantages compared to larger ones, making them more competitive. If that's what society values, it can easily be done.

Yes, you're both right. An important role of government is to use regulation to prevent the inevitable.

Long ago it was understood that monopolies are bad for us, but it looks like we're destined to learn these lessons again the hard way. I don't think it was ever imagined the people would vote monopolists into the position of regulator.

Theoretically possible regulation doesn’t make it less inevitable. Only actual regulation that is also being enforced would.

That seems like it goes without saying that yes the rules would need to change for results to change. Its just not a hard law or even some sort of natural state of humans.

The winning companies inevitably use their assets to exert undue influence on the policymakers, bending the regulations to their will.

> An inevitable outcome of capitalism

That is why there were laws against monopolies. But some far-right activists proposed the idea of "if it is a monopoly is because is so good that people wants it". And they run with it. It makes no sense as all these monopolies are created by buying competitors not by being better. But as it helps the new aristocracy to accumulate power many sellouts are in favor of it.

This is exactly what made the feudal system so unhealthy and hostile towards innovation. Wealth concentration means power concentration that makes a few people so powerful that new and different ideas are violently attack from positions of power. Kings do not want better farming or better fabrics if it means that they lose the control over it. Kings value control over anything else, and we are entering a new era of kings, concentrated wealth and stagnation. We can change that, break all monopolies, redistribute power and let a dynamic healthy diverse economy rise again and bring its fruits to society.

And plumbers, pest control, heating, HVAC, ....

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-16/private-e... (https://wallhop.io/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2...)

And where it isn't PE actually buying up local plumbing, heating, HVAC companies, it's "CRM lead generators" using automation tools to build plausible looking websites/phone number presences that look like a real company, fooling people who are searching for plumbing services in $city into calling them, then funnelling the lead to some local company in exchange for a percentage. Worst offender in this category is probably locksmiths.

Yelp has made a resurgence in my opinion. So far I have found a good garage door guy and painter guy. Everything negotiated via texting (phone call first). Make sure when they show up they don’t have an iPad.

Read Jessica Mitford's "The American Way of Death"

> Feeling that death had become much too sentimentalized, highly commercialized, and, above all, excessively expensive, Mitford published her research, which, she argues, documents the ways in which funeral directors took advantage of the shock and grief of loved ones' friends and relatives to convince them to pay far more than necessary for the funeral and other related services, such as availability of so-called "grief counselors", a title she claimed was unmerited. The book became a major bestseller and led to Congressional hearings on the funeral industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Way_of_Death

This book is mentioned a lot early in the article, and its effects on people's perception of the industry are discussed.

I was a funeral director. Left the industry in 2010 due to PTSD. Gave up my licence and never looked back. The mental health toll on the profession is a real thing given the highly emotional work, low pay, difficult working conditions and corporate influences on the industry.

I worked with 3 funeral directors who took their lives. Anyone in the industry is well acquainted with suicide, yet its a topic we avoid talking about. Still, I salute anyone who is still in the industry and those of us who have done it have a special bond and I would drop everything to help another funeral director if I knew they were in trouble (despite being out of the industry).

Unless you have done the job you will never understand the job and you are probably better off not understanding.

I've met two undertakers in my life, in two different European countries, both women and both seemingly pretty normal. One said that she had started as a beautician before finding that she preferred applying makeup to people who don't move, which I thought was quite funny.

If you really spend some time thinking about, the western "bury in the ground" funeral industry is morally sick and wrong. Spending many thousands of dollars to "embalm" a person and then thousands more on a big fancy wood casket. And high pressure sales tactics to upsell every part of the funeral services to the more expensive version of whatever it is.

Brief historical recap: The western cultural practice of chemical embalming originated before we had reliable 24x7 electricity and high-powered freezers and modern morgues. If there's some need to have a corpse around for a period of time until everyone can be gathered for a burial, we have the technology to do that without going through some weird pseudo-mummification chemical "embalming" process of hooking up a machine to pump chemicals into a corpse's veins and arteries.

edit: This is an ugly and uncomfortably thing to think about, but in my opinion, many "funeral home" service businesses are optimized to extract the absolute maximum amount of revenue by selling products/services to a grieving family with upsells at a time of their greatest psychological vulnerability and grief.

If you're going to bury people, there's a lot to be said for the traditional Islamic requirement (or equivalent) of basically, dig a 6 ft deep hole, wrap the person in a clean white sheet, and get them buried ASAP without going through all the rigmarole of embalming and fancy expensive casket.

You want to have a big elaborate memorial service? Ok sure great, whatever fits the needs of the family and friends. Spend the GDP of a small developing nation on it if you want to. But I truly don't see the point in trying to embalm/preserve/buy a fancy casket for a body that's intended to rot in the ground. Chemical preservation embalming and $8500 caskets are nonsensical.

The real cost now is the required “vault.”

It's not required. Nor is a casket.

You can be buried in a cardboard box. But the funeral director will be sure to remind your survivors that it's not waterproof.

For now. Considering how niche the industry and how little the public has experience with it that seems like prime fodder for regulatory capture.

I bet with less than $500k spent on astroturfing and PR you could whip the useful idiots into a frenzy, get the requisite (bullshit) academic papers and get some key language inserted into some EPA rule that all but requires the vault in the name of solving some groundwater problem that isn't actually a problem.

Some cemeteries require a vault. The problem they'll face with no vault is the ground will depress there as things decay, and they want to get grass growing there ASAP and not have to worry about leveling things out all the time. But many cemeteries will allow it and will just heap the dirt a little higher so it settles more evenly eventually.

My experience too - it’s about the cemeteries.

You may be getting downvoted because this is a bit of a rant, but I agree with you. Chemical embalming and sealed caskets aren't for the dead, they're for the living who don't want to think of their loved one decomposing in the ground. Funeral homes sell the illusion that they can somehow prevent that. Unfortunately, what happens to an embalmed body is equally gruesome, just slower and with added poison. Personally I'd rather let the worms recycle me into a nice shrub or something.

The solution for not decomposing is called cremation.

I think a lot of people don't want to visualize that either, hence open casket funerals. They want the illusion that the person is forever "just resting". Understandable, but unfortunately 100% fantasy.

I would think people who find it hard to accept their loved one’s body decomposing would not like the idea of it burning to ashes either.

One of the things you will learn after spending some time in the poorest parts of the developing world where the local cultural/religious practices don't do cremation, is that in many places, there is no equivalent of a "funeral home" or professional services for such. Each family is responsible for preparing the body of their relative and arranging for the burial themselves. It's a very visceral, in your face, hands on experience that people can't and won't do in western "developed" countries. Thus the standard practice of basically, doing quick prep on the deceased, getting them into a white cotton sheet (or local cultural equivalent) and buried quickly.

A friend of mine was pretty big on minimizing impact on the environment. We got this surreal funeral: a thousand people were invited, flew in from all over the world. Lavish digs rented at insane expense, lots of food, a gift bag and so on. And then when they brought in the deceased it got a bit weirder still because they had just rolled the body in a linen sheet. So many conflicting memories about that. He was a great guy by the way.

My understanding is that embalming is mainly an American thing, not a Western one. Caskets are also a lot cheaper around here (Austria).

Similar in Finland. Embalming is rather rare. And I think we know that bodies are supposed to naturally decompose once buried. Then again USA really seems to make absolutely everything as expensive as possible. While Europe is not exactly cheap at least it seems lot more reasonably priced.

My mum died this year so I have recent experience with this. It does seem, like so many things, to profit from the weak. But they do, of course, provide a valuable service. I didn't really fancy chucking my mum's body into my hatchback and going down the tip.

I didn't feel like they pushed hard at all to upsell anything, it wasn't like a car dealer, but the options were definitely available. We chose the cheapest possible coffin because what a ridiculous waste of resources otherwise. Literally nobody was going to scrutinise it and then it was going to get burnt. I noticed the catalogue had quite a few more pages in it, though.

Interestingly my dad, newly widowed, was much more sceptical of the whole thing than me. He found the language they used quite disagreeable. They would refer to the body as "her" and say things like they are "looking after her" etc. She had lost almost half her bodyweight before death so it is kinda weird that this half matters so much. To us, of course, she had already left. We looked after her, they were just moving a body around.

But you have to think, a lot of people will pay a lot more to buy into this illusion and perhaps soften the blow of the death. I feel like you have to confront it one way or another so just get it over and done with. I just imagine the souls of the departed watching from a higher plane of existence puzzled about why we care so much about their former bodies.

> Spending many thousands of dollars to "embalm" a person and then thousands more on a big fancy wood casket.

Is that general western thing or rather "there is small western subculture that does it while the rest of the west does NOT do it"? The funeral I was involved in did not involved "thousands of dollars" equivalent of casket or embalming.

I have lately noticed a lot of claims about what "west" does that seem to be very specific to just parts of America.

Our church does most of the work preparing the body for our parishioners. We have a group that goes to clean and dress the body, then brings it to the church in a simple coffin with dry ice until the funeral and burial. Frequently the only thing the family has to pay for is for coffin (the church keeps one or two on hand that the family can buy at cost) and the cemetery to dig a whole in the ground (we're not quite hardcore enough to do that b hand). We do insist on burial because we see cremation as disrespectful to human bodies that are created in the image of God, but usually use a simple wooden coffin and no vault if allowed by the cemetery, and no embalming if the family wants the members of the church to prepare the body.

>The women taking over the funeral industry

"More women enter the funeral industry" may be a better way of putting it but without the male insecurity.

"Over the past four decades, female enrollment in mortuary programs has grown from five percent to roughly 75 percent of recent graduating classes."

It's dramatic language, but justified, imo.

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