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Now, it seems, the news for consumers could get worse. In September, SCI, dogged by Loewen at every turn, launched a hostile bid to seize control of its foremost rival and increase its dominance of the death business in key U.S. markets. Yet despite the likely repercussions, the threatened takeover has drawn scant popular attention--chiefly because the consolidation of the industry has so far occurred, by design, well out of public view. The Loewen-O'Keefe story, however, provides a look at just what an SCI-Loewen combination could hold in store for future next of kin.
THE SECRET REVOLUTION
In a corporate replay of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, Loewen seeks to create the illusion that local funeral homes are still run exactly as they always have been, by native sons and daughters with a vested interest in the community. Although Loewen boasts of its acquisitions to shareholders, it otherwise keeps its ownership quiet. Anyone who calls David Riemann today, for example, gets an operator who says, "Riemann Service," just as operators have done since 1920. Says Ray Loewen: "Our objective is to honor the name and be a champion of tradition and history."
Outsiders, however, haven't seen it quite the same way. Jessica Mitford, author of The American Way of Death, the 1963 blockbuster that first disinterred the scandalous practices of the funeral industry, told TIME shortly before her death last summer that she planned to target the deceptive practices of consolidators in a revision of her book, which she jokingly titled Death Warmed Over (to be published by Knopf). "You think of dear old Mr. Johnson, an honest old chap that your family has dealt with over the years, and so you go to Johnson's, and it turns out to be this highly predatory different outfit where nothing's the same," she said. "I don't think people know anything about it. I think they're absolutely ignorant."
Which wouldn't matter if not for the tendency of Loewen and SCI to raise prices after taking control. The consolidators increase revenue through a combination of price hikes and a deft reconfiguring, or "remerchandising," of casket showrooms to ensure that customers buy caskets with far better profit margins. At the same time, they cut their costs by buying caskets and other materiel de mort at volume discounts and by linking funeral homes in clusters that share hearses, embalming rooms and other services. You may deposit your late Uncle Harry in that luxurious if slightly creepy Colonial house on the corner, but these days you have no guarantee he will stay there. This centralization can increase the risk of administrative errors like the one that occurred recently in Arizona when an SCI cluster facility mistakenly cremated a body that was supposed to be shipped intact to Utah. A spokesman for SCI, however, says such an error is no more likely to occur in a cluster than in any other operation. "We run very strict procedures for the identification and tracking of bodies," he says. "Even at that, we're not infallible."