The things they say
Over at the Connecting Directors site in America a funeral director observes: Never trust a funeral director who says, “This is the last thing you can do for your loved one.” What other upselling tricks and wiles do our native undertakers possess? Including facial expressions?
They’re on Targets!
By Andrew Hickson, independent funeral director in St Neots, Cambridgeshire, first published on his blog http://stneotsfuneraldirector.blogspot.com on 22nd June. I sat with a client earlier this week, arranging his wife’s funeral. We built up a rapport during our short time together, and as part of making the arrangements I gave the gentleman an estimate of the funeral expenses, […]
Down to Earth: Recruiting Volunteer Mentors
Any Londoners interested in this excellent initiative? Down to Earth, Quaker Social Action’s exciting new funeral support project, is now recruiting volunteers to be trained as mentors for the east London area. Mentors will gently support bereaved people on a low income as they deal with the funeral planning process. They will enable and empower […]
Tell them fully and tell them clearly
Regular readers of this blog will know of Teresa Evans and her campaigning work. If you don’t know Teresa, have a look at her website. I’ve always admired Teresa. She is an ordinary person possessed of extraordinary singlemindedness, tenacity and passion. She is also very nice. Teresa campaigns for better, fuller, clearer information for the […]
Exclusive! Dover undertaker achieves UK first.
I was going to blog today about the public meeting at Redditch town hall to debate the contentious matter of whether or not the crem should be used to heat a nearby swimming pool. I wanted to give you a blow-by-blow account. But in the event it was a non-event. There were perhaps thirty people […]
Bad gets worse
Once in a while you read something which doesn’t just confirm your instinct, it informs it. That happened to me bigtime today. Blogger Viridis Lumen has a post on this very sad story. The undertaker at the heart of this heartless event was our old friend Dignity plc, the company spawned by the vile, scandal-ridden […]
Coffins on the shopping channel
Newcastle undertaker Carl Marlow has, by his own accounts, been quiet for the last five years — busy building his business. For his fellow undertakers this was too good to last. Carl has never been one to take the view that the best way to achieve change is to work within the industry, and this is […]
A job with QSA?
If you live in London you may be interested in this job. If you don’t, you’ll still be interested in what Quaker Social Action is doing. In its own words: Quaker Social Action exists to resource, enable and equip people living on a low income in east London. We work to tackle social exclusion, seeing poverty […]
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 […]
Quakers get down to earth
A couple of months ago I was contacted by Quaker Social Action and invited to a planning group whose remit was the support of people in London on low incomes needing to arrange a funeral. I wasn’t able to go, to my ire. Sue Gill and John Fox* were speaking. I’ve never met them. The […]
