There’s to be an event in your honour. Pictures of you will be on display showing your life history from childhood through adulthood. Everyone you know will be there. Your family. Your co-workers, friends and neighbours. All your favourite music will be played and oh, the stories they will tell! By the time this party’s over, everyone will be convinced you qualify for sainthood. Sound like fun? It probably will be. There’s just one catch…you’re not invited.
It’s often been said that funerals are for the living – not the dead. We seem to forget that fact as we announce at cocktail parties that “we don’t want a funeral. They’re a waste of money.” The traditional funeral involving two days of visitation and lovely church service is the exception these days rather than the rule.
Suzanne Scott, executive director of the Funeral Service Association of Canada, confirms that funerals are becoming less traditional. “The emphasis is definitely more on celebrating the life of the deceased rather than on the mourning process. More services are non-denominational and are being held at funeral homes rather than inside of churches. It’s not unusual for the service to include rock music rather than traditional hymns.”
We’ve even broken with tradition when it comes to our final resting place. More Canadians are opting for cremation rather than a traditional burial in a casket. According to Canadian Statistics for the Cremation Association, the number of cremations rose from 38.7 per cent in 1994 to 56 per cent in 2004. Cost savings, portability for families living at a distance and environmental benefits are considered to be the primary reasons for people choosing this path. It’s a very practical thought process.
“Some of the traditional funeral rituals are being modified to support these new trends,” confirms Scott. “Urn carriers are utilized in place of pall-bearers to carry the urn in for the funeral service.” With the departure from the “one-size fits-all” service, one wonders what’s driving this change.
The de-emphasizing of the secular religious aspect of bereavement is probably driven by several factors. Fewer Canadians are affiliated with a specific church or attend church regularly. It also follows the customization trend that’s showing up in every industry right now. This kinder, gentler grieving process may also be a byproduct of shifting demographics in the funeral industry itself. In 1970 only about five per cent of the graduates of funeral directors schools were female. Now the majority of them are women with some statistics indicating 51 to 75 per cent of graduating students are female. It’s been suggested that women are uniquely suited to handle the needs of the new demands being placed on the funeral industry. Consumers are now looking to funeral homes to provide emotional support and strategies to facilitate the grieving process.
“It used to be that a funeral director needed brute strength to do much of the heavy lifting required to transport the deceased. New equipment and more cremations have made the physical demands on a funeral director much less significant. The funeral director’s role has truly changed and women are well suited to address this new landscape,” says Scott. This new landscape is not only consumer driven – it’s also a byproduct of an industry in transition.
Funeral homes were typically run as sole proprietorships and often were family businesses passed from one generation to the next. Running a funeral home requires lots of capital. This type of business comes with specialized equipment and materials, vehicles, and large buildings. Ample parking is required so the lot housing the funeral home is generally large. You can imagine how expensive the property taxes are. As the age of the “vigilante consumer” arrived, the cost of a funeral came under scrutiny and profit margins became slimmer. “Caskets used to be a significant profit centre for funeral homes but as consumers became more pragmatic and cremation gained favour this changed,” confirms Scott. Funeral homes now provide more of the value added services that support the grieving process. Grief counselling, video tributes and photo galleries are ways that the funeral industry is shifting to a more consultative business.
The funeral industry went through some significant consolidation a few years ago especially in Ontario, one that has reversed somewhat in recent years. The Lowen Group re-emerged as the Alderwoods Group in 2002 after going into bankruptcy protection in 1999. Trillium Funeral Service Corporation also went into acquisition mode several years ago, yet began divesting itself of smaller locations over the past few years. The consolidation trend has shifted more towards local funeral homes perhaps merging with one or two other local funeral homes. It gives them some economies of scale yet still allows the business to maintain a local presence and flexibility. “Many funeral homes are moving to a full service business proposition. Some are buying florist shops and most have alliances with local florists. Funeral homes try to redeploy funeral flowers to community centres and old age homes but actually finding the time to arrange and implement this process can be difficult. If florists could actually pick up the flowers after the service and deliver them to the recipients – the funeral homes would be thrilled,” suggests Scott. Environmental sustainability is a consumer trend touching many industries and the bereavement industry is no exception. “Green caskets” made of biodegradable materials are gaining favour and many consumers prefer cremation because they literally want to leave a smaller environmental footprint. The cremation process does cause some undesirable emissions though – a fact many consumers aren’t aware of.
As baby boomers enter old age and pass away, there’s no doubt that the bereavement industry will be a very active one. Traditional funeral services are currently taking a back seat to the new main event – the wake. With this shift, there is a danger that in our haste to get to the fond memories of our dearly departed we may gloss over the business of grieving. If we don’t take the time to grieve our loss properly it may come back to bite us later on. “Funeral homes often have to deal with ashes of unclaimed relatives by diligently following up with family members,” says Scott. “I do get some calls from people who years later decide that having a headstone and a final resting place to visit their loved one’s remains suddenly becomes important to them when perhaps years earlier it wasn’t. They’re often trying to work through some unresolved grieving issues.” The financial stability of the funeral industry depends on our collective ability to get the consumer to place a value on the grieving process and to provide invaluable support during that process. The average wedding now costs approximately $20,000 with 50 per cent of these marriages ending in divorce. The cost of the average funeral is a fraction of that price tag. If a mutual fund came with the same odds of success that most marriages do, it would be labelled as a being a high risk and potentially a poor investment. The best investment is clear – it’s really about function over form.
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