funeralcomparison.co.uk
A reader has written to me to draw my attention to funeralcomparison.co.uk. Is it, he asks, a scam? I’d not come across it before. If you go to the site you’ll find that it enables you to, in their words, “find the exact funeral requirements you require in-line with your budget. You can search from over […]
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 […]
Head-in-noose funeral plans
There was a good and much-needed hatchet job on whole-life insurance in the Daily Mail last month: Funeral plans aggressively advertised to older people – often during daytime TV ads – have been exposed as a raw deal. More than 4.5 million people hold these plans — otherwise known as whole of life policies — which pay out […]
The labourer is worthy his/her hire
While I was well out of it last week on my guano-spattered rock set in a silver sea, the militant wing of this blog’s readership did a number on Lovingly Managed. It seems to have ended in either mutual exasperation or bewilderment. Probably a bit of both. Heavy breathing, for sure. Perhaps the greatest dialectical […]
Indy undertakers on the counter-attack
Saif’s IPSOS-Mori price comparison survey published in February 2010 was dynamite. It showed that independents are generally cheaper than two big beasts of the industry, Co-operative Funeralcare and Dignity. Had Saif got the message out to the funeral-buying public it would have hit the big beasts’ bottom line bigtime. But the message never got out, […]
Rattle his bones
There’s been quite a lot of nattering in the papers lately about the society-shaming rise in the number of what they like to call pauper funerals. Yes, shock horror, more and more people are dying without leaving enough money to pay for their funeral. So, even in this day and age, they suffer the, er, […]
Brand new hearse, only £60!
Here’s a charming story from Wales: The family of a frugal farm contractor who died aged 87 paid tribute to him by building his hearse out of scrap. For just £60 relatives of William Royden John built the funeral cart which transported him to St James’ Church in Rudry from second-hand materials. His son Ross […]
Site I like
There’s interesting work going on over in Boston, Massachusetts. Two women, Ruth Faas and Sue Cross, offer a range of services to the bereaved. They have a reading room where people can sit in comfort and find out about death and dying. They offer advice and contacts to those wanting a green or self-managed funeral. […]
From rags to riches
Whether or not funerals are too expensive depends on how much money you’ve got and how you like to spend it. Some like to say it with a Batesville casket, mountains of flowers, a fleet of vintage Bentleys, prancing horses, a military band, the Red Arrows—the sky’s the limit. If you’ve got lots of dough […]
Rebranding the Dismal Trade
Funeral directors know that they are viewed with suspicion, aversion, distrust. It’s what they do that lies at the root of this – the dark art of dealing with dead bodies. Yuk. How different they are from us. We don’t like people who are different from us. But most people express their feelings about funeral […]
