The Independent, June 12, 1994—
GRAVE UNDERTAKING: GROUP THAT BURIED ELVIS WANTS TO TAKE OVER U.K. FIRM. “I’m here to do a deal, and I’m here for the duration,” said Bill Heiligbrodt, SCI’s Texan president…. Mr. Heiligbrodt has been called a cowboy but he loves the term. “I gather it’s not such a compliment in Britain, but I am a cowboy…. I just love being competitive,” he said.
The Telegraph, August 11, 1994—
The Texas-based Service Corporation International is plotting a takeover of Britain’s third-biggest undertaker, Great Southern.
However sensitively it approaches the British market, inevitably any U.S. involvement is bound to raise here the spectre of the American way of death. Across the Atlantic, death has long meant big money.
The Tqqwelegraph, August 13, 1994—
TEXANS OUT TO MAKE ANOTHER KILLING. The Texas funerals group Service Corporation International has become trigger-happy…. These Texan undertakers have mastered taking-over rather quickly….
The Guardian, September 3, 1994—
Last night SCI president, Bill Heiligbrodt, was jubilant about the success of his lightning campaign, which started on May 30 when he landed in the U.K. with the fixed intention of building a major business in the U.K. “I’m having a lot of fun now,” he said…. “We are here now for the rest of time.”
Across the pond, the funeral trade press was in a celebratory mood. The Southern Funeral Director(September 1994) offered some predictions about the future of British funerals now that SCI was on the scene:
The British cremation rate runs about 75 percent. This is not necessarily by choice, but because nobody markets “Americanized funerals” to them. The British aren’t real big on selling the casketed service. But leave it to SCI to educate them. SCI will establish yet another stronghold market for caskets.
Resistance to SCI’s pedagogical incursion was soon apparent. Pharos, organ of the British Cremation Society, called its account of the takeover INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. It warned of “possible price rise and the arrival of U.S.-style high-pressure sales methods.” Imported American coffins, it noted, may have a markup of up to 900 percent.
Unkindest of all was a prizewinning television documentary deriding the SCI takeover, scathingly titled “Over My Dead Body,” unanimously praised by the television critics and chosen as “Pick of the Week” by the Times. It was broadcast on November 27, 1994, just three months after SCI had consummated its U.K. transaction.
Set forth for British viewers to gape at in wonder are a funeral directors’ trade fair at which are displayed a gruesome array of embalming fluids, tools for removing the innards, cosmetics for corpses, and a dazzling assortment of caskets, culminating in “our top-of-the-line” item priced at $85,000. Jerry Pullin, SCI’s man in London, explains:
We feel the opportunities are greatest in offering a broader range of merchandise and services which will enhance our revenue base by offering enhanced consumer choices.
L. William Heiligbrodt, president of SCI, tells the viewing audience why the average price of Australian funerals rose by 40 percent after his company entered that market:
We have found in Australia in the short time we’ve been there that people have chosen to spend more on funerals. I want again to emphasize “chosen.” It’s been their choice. The fact that our revenues per funeral have grown in Australia is because the Australian public have demanded it. In the U.K., that’s our goal, as well.
There is a segment on SCI’s immediate predecessor, one Howard Hodgson, known as the “yuppie undertaker,” a great fan of Mrs. Thatcher and one of the entrepreneurial stars of the Iron Lady’s regime. He describes how he achieved economies of scale via the “clustering” strategy, refurbishing funeral parlors, buying new hearses, and adding services like embalming, in fact, preparing the ground for SCI, to whom he eventually sold.
According to “Over My Dead Body,” 50 percent of the British dead were embalmed in the Hodgson era; yet the Independentof January 7, 1992, quoted Peter Hall, general secretary of the British Institute of Embalming, as saying that “a quarter of all corpses in this country are now embalmed.” He voiced the unappetizing suggestion that “the difference between a well-embalmed body and an untreated one is the difference between a plum and a prune.” If these figures are accurate, Mr. Hodgson had succeeded in less than three years in doubling the number of British dead transformed from prune to plum, an encouraging portent for the newly arrived SCI.
I was fortunate to be given what is known in the trade as a “cameo appearance” in the video. This took place in a large and well-appointed undertaker’s showroom where Derek Gibbs, owner of the London Casket Company, explained the offerings. He obligingly raised the casket lids to display a variety of beauteous linings in “luxury velvet” or “high-quality crepe.” Best of all was “The Last Supper,” described in the catalogue as “mahogany finished poplar timber, cream madeira crepe interior. Scene of The Last Supper colour insert in lid. Swing bar handles and adjustable bed. Angel corner pieces supplied on request at no extra cost.”
“Oh, how absolutely smashing,” I said. “I think they’re lovely, they’re absolutely top-quality,” replied Mr. Gibbs. “We do not hard sell them at all. They really just sell themselves.” We had the following conversation:
JM: But they must cost a fortune. First off, how much is the wholesale cost?
DG: Well, we supply purely to the trade, so what funeral directors do in this country is they buy the casket from us, and then they add it to the cost of their traditional funeral service.
JM: How much do you charge them for this, for example? You charge them how much?
DG: Well, I would be loath to say, because as I say we supply to the trade and they would actually add this to their traditional funeral.
JM: That’s why I wanted to find out. How much do you pay for it?
DG: I don’t really want to discuss what we pay—is this a rehearsal?
Long accustomed to the reticence of American funeral directors on the sensitive subject of the wholesale cost of caskets—one of the best-kept trade secrets—I was not surprised by Mr. Gibbs’s reluctance to disclose prices. But as it turned out, this was by no means the end of the matter. Some weeks later, on January 30, 1995, Mr. Gibbs wrote to the Broadcasting Complaints Commission, which is responsible for maintaining standards of fairness and privacy. (Its function is roughly parallel to that of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.) His letter was full of anguish:
Apart from one small moment, I thought that I handled myself well and gave sensible and reasonable answers. I accepted that my products are very foreign and extravagant but explained that there was a demand for elaborate high quality burial caskets.
It was to be my first appearance on television and so I told all my customers, friends and family to be sure to watch it. You can therefore imagine my acute embarrassment when the program turned out to be a complete hatchet job on the industry that I serve….
At the time, I tried to laugh it off…. As time goes on, I felt increasingly angered by the whole affair. Every customer that I visit taunts me with the phrase, “This is only a rehearsal, isn’t it?”…
Reading this letter, I could not fail to be impressed by the poignancy of Mr. Gibbs’s experience. However, it hasn’t hurt his business. In April 1996 he told an interviewer that his casket sales for 1994–95 had been 312—up from 242 the year before. “It was slow going to begin with,” he said, “but our sales have grown steadily over the years. This last quarter, January, February, March, has been our busiest quarter ever. So it’s getting better. People like the idea of preservation. That is the point of the sale.”