Bonus culture
If you are out celebrating this weekend, spare a toast to the lucky managers of Co-operative Funeralcare, who have just banked their annual bonuses. For those in Bands 3 and 4, that’s £2,500 — £5,000. For those in Bands 1 and 2, who are on a long-term incentive plan, that’s serious moolah. The Good Funeral […]
Whose job is it anyway?
Legal, decent, honest and truthful?
This advert appeared in the Liverpool Echo. This is what it says: The Fairways Funeral Plan is individually tailored to meet your needs. Everything featured in the [yawn] Fairways Funeral Plan is fully guaranteed no matter how high prices rise and we’ve created flexible payment plans to suit any budget. So even in uncertain times, […]
Down and dirty?
One must be careful what one says. And before one says it, one must try and resist distraction. I had intended to say a few words about Co-operative Funeralcare. Yes, again. Because they’re worth it. They are The Enemy. (Hello, Co-op lawyers, see if you can find anything actionable in what follows.) But, as I […]
Gilded poo
It’s been a dispiriting couple of days. Once again the damned Co-op Funeralcare has re-announced the obvious in yet another self-serving survey and, incredibly, reaped a rich harvest of column inches in the UK’s newspapers. You’ve almost certainly encountered some of it. I wasn’t going to rise to it. At this time of the year […]
Ethical schmethical
Here’s a question sent to money-problem solver Margaret Dibben in the Guardian. It exemplifies the utter crapness of funeral plans and the business methods of the People’s Undertaker. Two years ago, after the untimely death of a young friend, I took out a bronze cremation plan with The Co-operative Funeralcare. I discussed it on the […]
Pot, kettle…
Here is a hubristic report from the Co-operative College in Manchester on a fact-finding mission from South Africa. The mission came hard on the heels of helpful research by our own, dear Co-op into the ‘exorbitant’ cost of funerals in South African townships. A much needed reduction in expensive funeral costs could be on the cards […]
LGBT
Partners Mike Konigsfeld and Tom Brandl in Cologne, Germany have designed a coffin for gay male funerals. If you look carefully you can see that it is festooned with muscly naked men. There’s no doubting the business sense behind the idea. As Mike says, “People are cutting back in the recession but the one group […]
Unmasking the wolves
Over in the US, Service Corporation International (SCI) the multinational deathcare conglomerate which, here in the UK, begat Dignity, is in hot water. Again. One of its funeral homes, trading under the name of Stanetsky Memorial Chapels, mixed up two bodies. When they realised what they’d done, it seems that they illegally exhumed the one […]
Claire’s last word
Everyone looks at other people differently according to what they do. Hairdressers scan your hair, dentists your teeth, snobs your shoes… Undertakers? Why, they measure you for your coffin of course. Surveying a funeral, the preoccupations of an undertaker are quite different from those of anybody else. Ordinary folk take in the procession, the flowers, […]
