This agency only works with local, privately-owned funeral homes. This means you will be dealing with a trusted member of your community, not some distant corporation only worried about a bottom line.
1. Pricing and profits are too often more important than service. Chain funeral homes are normally “publicly traded companies,” which means they are accountable to their stockholders for continued profit year after year. This frequently means continual price increases, year after year. 2. Most of them don’t give you a discount on services if you use your church instead of their building. They claim it’s just as much or more work for them to use your church. The reality is that they want to charge you the higher price for services, because it is the price they need for high profits. But even private funeral homes do this. 3. Chain funeral homes have a higher turnover of employees, and that includes morticians/ funeral directors, salespeople, and managers. This translates into lack of long-term consistency of service and a higher probability of errors being made at your family’s expense. 4. Chain funeral homes most often force you to use their funding companies, insurance companies that are part of the same larger conglomerate corporation, no matter how expensive it is for a plan. Privately owned funeral homes, on the other hand, often offer you multiple funding sources. They usually have no vested interest in the company they use. They simply use whichever they feel is best for the family or for themselves. 5. You’re more likely to get “cookie cutter” service than service that meets your family’s exact needs and wants. And this can include casket price fixing.
1. Privately-owned providers tend to use the same people year after year, doing the job the same way. They are less prone to turnover of personnel, and key people such as funeral directors are hand-picked and interviewed thoroughly by the owner(s) 2. They are concerned with good will and their reputation in the community. 3. Private companies are more ready, willing and able to work overtime to get the job done right at no extra charge to you. In public companies, employees won’t be as likely to go the extra mile to get things done—especially if they won’t be getting paid any overtime pay. 4. Many privately-owned funeral homes have been in business a very long time. Two examples in the Salt Lake area are Goff Mortuary and Jenkins-Soffe Funeral Home/Crematory, which both started the same year, 1915. Tradition of high quality service is important to many companies that have been around a long time. Even though many public companies have also been around a long time, profit seems to be more important than integrity and reputation. 5. Even though public or chain funeral homes have caring people, you’re more likely to get individual attention to all the important details from a private company. 6. Pricing is done on a more reasonable basis with privately-owned funeral service providers. It is not done at the “corporate” level by managers who only look at financial statements and never deal with families at the time of need. 7. They aren’t as likely to make radical changes in how things are done or in pricing when ownership remains the same. In publicly-traded funeral companies, a new manager could be put in place with ideas drastically different from his predecessor and it could adversely affect business and the community, and it could also mean ghastly price increases.
"The key to controlling future funeral and cemetery costs is to arrange and pay for them in advance." "...people will purchase more in an emotionally charged at-need moment than they will in a calmer and more stable pre-need moment." "Pre-planning is absolutely the best thing you can do to ensure that you get the final arrangements you want and save money at the same time." "In my opinion, insurance policies are the best way to go. The insurance industry is highly regulated. Also, insurance companies are typically more balanced and more stable than most death merchants. Even when insurance companies go bankrupt, state and federal agencies come to the rescue of policyholders. Certainly the same cannot be said of funeral homes and cemeteries!"
