Called to account
Other funeral ‘homes’ are also available…
Dying Matters, the former NCPC coalition, now under the wings of Hospice UK, sent out an e-mail bulletin this week with an update on this year’s Dying Matters Awareness Week, presumably to most of their 32,000 members. Top feature in the bulletin was the large Co-op logo and blurb shown above. The neat hook of […]
Burgundy stays Burgundy, Lilac becomes Turquoise
In Burgundy coloured news The Telegraph has been hard at work this month, convincing us that the funeral situation in the UK really is dire. On the 10th June, we heard about a grieving gentlemen in New Milton, Hants, who is digging a grave in his back garden to bury his 101 year old mother, unwilling to […]
Go figure
The only way is Ethics?
The Co-operative — What Makes Us Different “I sometimes wonder if the greatest institutional problem of our time is not plain, unvarnished evil, but this obsession with Ethics as an outward form, with compliance rather than conscience. The whole idea of an Ethical business, as distinct from a normal one which behaves ethically, is […]
Funeral Flowers
Posted by Richard Rawlinson Paul Flowers was a successful man: chairman of Co-operative Bank, Labour councillor and Methodist minister. He’s now shunned by all three pillars of the establishment—business, politics and church—after his penchant for taking crystal meth with male prostitutes hit the headlines. When Flowers first hooked up with Manchester Lads escort Ciaron Dodd, he […]
Why the shambles at the Co-op is so serious
“One version of the “better” that mutuals have to be is that they have to be seen by customers to be more “decent” than other businesses – because that provides a motive for some consumers to spend their money with them. And the second version of the better is that they have to be conspicuously […]
This is how it’s supposed to be
From the website of the Federation of Funeral Cooperatives of Québec: Cooperative funeral homes have proven a highly successful model in Canada, and especially Quebec. The cooperative movement is growing, with 9,600 deaths treated by funeral cooperatives in 2011 in Canada, up more than 5 percent from 2010. The Fédération des Coopératives Funéraires du Québec (Federation […]
Fallout
I expect there will be a number of stories like this. This one’s from this is Gloucestershire and is about Glad Stockdale’s experience of a Midcounties Co-op funeral, which all came back to her when she watched Undercover Undertaker, of which this is Gloucestershire writes: The programme showed bodies piled up in a warehouse, instead […]
Shame
UPDATE On July 21 2011 Sonny, the stillborn baby of Sandra and Sai Lao, was cremated. The Laos were distraught when they were told. They denied having signed the cremation forms. Co-op funeral director David Durden said no, they had, claiming they were so distressed they must have forgotten. Durden was taken to court, found […]
