TW: I admit once the bailouts start they are hard to stop. Monkey see, monkey do becomes the approach. If them, why not me etc. So naturally funeral directors have decided to petition for some bailout support. Luckily so far they have been thwarted, but they are suffering not because of fewer customers but because the customers are using fewer frills and extras. This, of course, is a clear example of what happens in a demand contraction, even the unavoidable consumption is impacted as consumers squeeze the spending down to only the minimum necessary to get by.
From Dana Milbank at WaPo:
"It has long been suspected that the funeral business is immune from economic cycles, that the Grim Reaper tends not to follow the stock market. But this time, funeral homes are discovering that their clients' thrift -- sheet-metal urns instead of bronze caskets, cheese-and-cracker nibbles instead of traditional funeral luncheons -- is positively killing profits.
So funeral directors did what everybody else does: They asked for a federal bailout.
"We recognized that there may be a situation where a lot of folks who were displaced or unemployed might need some help in paying for their funerals," John Fitch Jr., lobbyist for the National Funeral Directors Association, explained yesterday at the group's annual gathering, at the Mayflower Hotel. "We had some preliminary discussions about providing some stimulus payments to the states" for funerals, he added.
It was quite an undertaking, and it didn't work; apparently, funding funerals wasn't regarded as a spur to economic growth, because much of the benefit gets deep-sixed.
...(It's not that people have stopped dying. Though there's some evidence that the death rate drops during a recession (people drive less, for example, so they have fewer accidents), any such effect will soon be swamped as baby boomers prepare to shuffle off this mortal coil. When it comes to the death rate, "the statistics on this are fairly certain," funeral director Patrick Lynch explained at yesterday's news conference. "It's 100 percent."
...a trio of funeral directors, all in dark suits, lined up at a table, draped in black fabric, for the news conference. They looked much like the banking and automotive executives who came to town to ask for government help, except they attracted rather less interest: a grand total of two reporters.
The undertakers traded tales of penny-pinching mourners. Lynch, of Michigan, spoke about the "huge bowl of Bazooka bubble gum" displayed at one visitation. "Didn't cost a lot of money," he said. "That's what we see people doing."
"Instead of feeding everybody dinner or lunch, we've been throwing little, for lack of a better word, cocktail-party type things, cheese and crackers," added James Olson of Wisconsin. "Also," he said, "my cremation rate has gone up in the last two years. . . . I'm at 42 percent."
Lynch turned to the "merchandise" of the funeral. "People, rather than selecting a copper or a bronze casket, may choose a 20-gauge steel casket painted in a copper color," he said. "Instead of choosing a mahogany casket made of real mahogany, they may choose a poplar casket stained with a mahogany stain, which to most observers looks the same. Perhaps they would chose a crepe interior as opposed to a velvet interior in a casket. Perhaps they would choose a sheet-metal urn as opposed to a solid-bronze urn."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/31/AR2009033103477.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns
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