A network of trade associations reflects the complexity of ambitions and viewpoints within the industry. While one undertaker may (and often does) belong to more than one association, and while the various associations may (and often do) join forces on a specific issue, the associations are not always in accord, for on many questions they represent conflicting economic interests.
The names of the associations are in some cases merely descriptive of the membership they represent: National Funeral Directors Association, Jewish Funeral Directors Association, National Funeral Directors & Morticians Association. Others have chosen more imaginative and even lyrical names: International Order of the Golden Rule and National Selected Morticians.
The associations with the high-sounding names generally limit membership to one funeral establishment to a community, to enable members to display the insignia on their advertising material and letterheads. To the public, it might seem that to be “Selected” denotes some sort of official certification by an outside agency; actually the members Select one another.
National Selected Morticians is a go-ahead concern numbering among its members some of the largest and most successful firms in the country. “You have to be sponsored by a member and you join by invitation,” one of them explained to me.
While all the trade associations like to refer to undertaking as “the Profession,” their understanding of that term varies widely. NSM seems to use it because it sounds nice, rather than for its full implications. The NSM emphasis is on merchandising, sound business methods. They are in favor of prearranged, prefinanced funerals, and price advertising because their member establishments depend primarily on big volume.
Mr. Wilber Krieger, managing director of NSM, was also the director of the National Foundation of Funeral Service in Evanston. Here a school of management is maintained, where courses are offered in advertising, market analysis, credit and collection, ethical practice, letter writing, sales techniques in funeral service, and so on. The Foundation is housed in a two-story ersatz-Colonial mansion. Among its facilities is a “selection room for Merchandising Research to improve merchandising, to demonstrate lighting (more than five different types in the room), to show arrangements and decoration through the twenty-five-unit balanced line of caskets.” The Avenue of Approach and Aisles of Resistance, Mr. Krieger’s own brainchildren, are here laid out for all to see. There is also a vault selection room aimed at helping the funeral director “create a ‘Quality’ atmosphere, conducive to better vault sales,” and at showing him how to “increase his burial vault profits by encouraging better sales through better merchandising.”
The oldest, largest, and most influential of the funeral trade associations is the National Funeral Directors Association, founded in the 1880s. From the beginning, the NFDA has campaigned for professional status; from the beginning, their dilemma, still unresolved after the passage of years, was evident. The first code of ethics, adopted in 1884, says, “There is, perhaps, no profession, after that of the sacred ministry, in which a high-toned morality is more imperatively necessary than that of a funeral director’s. High moral principles are his only safe guide.” But a corollary objective of the organization—that of keeping prices pegged as high as possible—was expressed in a resolution passed in the previous year: “Resolved, that we, as funeral directors, condemn the manufacture of covered caskets at a price less than fifteen dollars for an adult size.”
The National Funeral Directors Association serves its affiliated state groups through bulletins, keeping watch on legislative developments, lobbying activities, advising member firms on methods of cost accounting, and other business procedures. It conducts an annual convention at which casket manufacturers, burial-clothing firms, vault men and embalming-fluid supply houses exhibit their wares. It sends speakers to state conventions. It conducts surveys among its members on operating expenses, income, etc., as well as on such apparently far-afield subjects as reading habits—a 1958 survey reveals with pride that 56.7 percent of funeral service personnel read “newspapers, trade journals, magazines and books,” compared with only 40 percent for the population as a whole.
The NFDA concerns itself deeply with public relations. It has produced a couple of films: Funeral Service— A Part of the American Wayand To Serve the Living, prepared in conjunction with the Association of Better Business Bureaus, Inc. Two of the most important public relations aids, the use of which have been constantly urged upon its members by the NFDA, are a pamphlet, Facts Every Family Should Know About Funerals and Interments, issued by the Association of Better Business Bureaus, and Funeral Service Facts and Figures, issued annually by the NFDA.
The Association of Better Business Bureaus is held in high esteem by many people, who regard it as a watchdog organization designed to protect the public from unscrupulous and crooked businessmen. Its stamp of approval on the line of conduct of any enterprise is bound to allay doubts and suspend criticism. I was surprised to find how many of the “facts” every family should know had the familiar ring of NFDA propaganda, and that the pamphlet, which has been distributed by funeral directors in the hundreds of thousands, closely follows the NFDA line in all important respects. I asked the BBB where they got the “facts” for the pamphlet; they replied, from the National Funeral Directors Association and other (unidentified) sources. For example, the “fact” given in the pamphlet that “there is an adequate service available in every funeral establishment for every purse and taste” is given “on the basis of information furnished by the NFDA.” The “fact” that “most funeral directors do not consider it ethical to advertise prices… and [that] this view is shared by a majority of the public” is again reported as “the official position of the NFDA.”
By the mid-1990s, the most persistent advertisers, to the consternation of the conventional mortuaries that maintain elaborate establishments on Main Street, were the low-cost, low-overhead cremation providers. The majority of funeral homes still refrain from public disclosure of their prices—let alone price advertising—although FTC rules require them to make price information available when asked.
In recent years, the NFDA and other trade associations have provided their members with annual estimates of “average prices” currently charged for mortuary services and vaults. The estimates of the NFDA and FFDA (Federated Funeral Directors of America) vary very little. FFDA’s average for 1995 was $4,211 for “services plus casket,” plus $770 for outside container. Industry observers have no doubt that the dissemination of these numbers within the trade serves to establish uniform price minimums, in violation of the antitrust laws. Hence the caveat, “The NFDA sponsored this study to give you statistics with which you can compare data from your funeral service operation. However, you should not take any or all of the findings as a suggestion for funeral service pricing in your establishment.” This caveat is reminiscent of a legend printed in prominent letters on the wine bricks sold for a time during Prohibition: “Do not under any circumstances place this brick in one gallon of water and let it stand at room temperature for one week, since this will cause it to turn into wine, an alcoholic beverage, the manufacture or possession of which is illegal.”
In 1930 the NFDA established an academy of funerary erudition with the scholarly-sounding name Institute of Mortuary Research—the actual function of which was, according to the NFDA’s official historians, “to disseminate information favorable to organized funeral directing to the various media of communication… and to ‘trouble-shoot’ points of hostility and attacks on the occupation.”