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But not always. Ray Loewen once invited SCI's founder, Robert Waltrip, aboard, and the two men, both wearing yachtsman's caps, almost came to blows. O'Keefe likewise failed to appreciate the charm. Over a sumptuous dinner, O'Keefe told Loewen he did not want a fight and proposed a number of ways to resolve the dispute. But Loewen, he says, turned the evening into an effort to persuade him to sell his own best funeral homes. At one point, he says, Loewen boasted how he maneuvered John Wright to sell the Wright & Ferguson Funeral Home by threatening to build a brand-new home in his territory. Loewen demonstrated how Wright's hand shook so much the coffee sloshed from his cup. "To brag about being able to intimidate somebody is not evidence of a gentlemanly sensibility," O'Keefe says. "It told me he's an arrogant guy, that he's a hard pusher."
Angry now, O'Keefe filed his lawsuit. This time Loewen dispatched a top executive, John Turner, currently working for SCI, to settle the lawsuit. Turner, in an offer so appealing it just about stunned O'Keefe, proposed to sell O'Keefe the Riemann family's insurance company, which was like offering to sell the Hatfield homestead to a McCoy.
No one, however, bothered to mention the plan to the Riemanns. They too charged up to Vancouver. David Riemann presented Ray Loewen with a bitter five-page letter in which he questioned Loewen's commitment to "bottoms-up management," Loewen's stated philosophy of delegating authority to regional managers and local funeral directors. Riemann complained that his wife Tammy had been fired by Loewen without notice, then continued, "I have had all responsibility of operations taken from me. I have yet to figure out, or have I ever been told, why I was totally eliminated from any and all operations functions." In a postscript he noted, "I understand that I am no longer president of Riemann Funeral Homes Inc. on the Gulf Coast; I have been removed as an officer of most of the other affiliates. Why?"
In practice, new members of the Loewen family are likely to find they do not have quite as much leeway as bottoms-up management might suggest. The company immediately begins a process that Ray Loewen calls "normalization," or bringing newly acquired homes up to financial expectations. All the comfy perks of a family business--extra cars and dry cleaning--suddenly disappear. And prices rise. Loewen also institutes its "Third Unit Target Merchandising" system in the casket showroom, which capitalizes on the propensity of survivors to avoid the cheapest two caskets and choose the next one up in price. "It's no different from any other business operating a showroom," says Lawrence Miller, president of Loewen's cemetery division. But often, two former officials agree, this means banishing a newly acquired home's usual lowest-price offerings and replacing them with more expensive substitutes, so that when the customer picks that third-unit target, he ends up choosing a casket that yields a much better profit.